We Call This "Ambi"

One of my favorite parts of making Threshold, and just being a person alive on this planet, is sitting somewhere and listening to a place. Whatever happens to be there, doing its thing. Creatures and weather, plants and Earthly processes, all joining in to make little rhythms and melodies. Harmonies and dissonances. Blending, colliding, pausing, crescendoing, subsiding.

When you’re making a narrative podcast like we do, or a radio feature, these sounds of places are called “ambi,” as in “ambience.” The stuff that’s not in focus. Background.

Ambi can include human voices and human-made sounds, of course. But generally, if a person is talking, our ears snap to it, and focus on it. What was ambi becomes story, or wants to. This is cool! It shows how much we’re wired to pay attention to each other.

But there’s a downside too. Our intense, instinctive tendency to prioritize human voices can and often does lead us to think of ourselves as the lead character in every situation, the star of eve…