We Call This Ambi

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com

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 every show. There’s us, and there’s ambi.

So here’s my invitation to you: listen to this five minutes of sound from an undisclosed location, and let your imagination roam a bit. I’ll tell you ahead of time that little to nothing “happens” in this five minutes—at least not from a human perspective. And maybe not from any perspective. But is it ambi? Just an acoustic background? Or something else, maybe something more?

Who decides?