Threshold · Auricle Productions

Hark | 14 | Disquieting

September 2, 2025·55 min·3 clips

We're like that obnoxiously loud person at a restaurant, except we're doing it to the entire planet.

The question returns like an echo. The host starts with the annoyance of a loud restaurant or concert, then opens it out into something harder to shrug off: people filling the world with sound that other life has to live inside. The noise comes from factories, construction sites, backyards, and the constant movement of people and goods, day and night. Birds, frogs, whales, and other animals cannot ask us to keep it down. That lopsidedness gives the episode its bite. The burden of noticing belongs to the ones making the din. The host keeps circling back to listening. How many sounds in a normal day are not made by people? How often is it quiet enough to hear wind, rain, frogs, or birds? The ocean gives the question more scale. A guest says anyone who goes into the ocean makes sound, so anyone adding to that noise has some responsibility to quiet the water. The answers are practical. Acoustic sanctuaries could give whales quieter places. Slower boats can cut a vessel's noise signature. Ports can reward quieter ships, shipping lanes can shift away from critical habitat, and ship quieting technology is getting better. There is no single fix. Still, the guest sees sound as oddly hopeful compared with chemical pollution: switch off the source, and the sound is gone. The host does not pretend the problem is small. Research says noise pollution is serious for animals and for human health. But serious does not have to mean hopeless. Listener sounds give the ending its warmth. Frogs and toads sent in by listeners become a small, living answer to the opening question. Destruction is not the only story here. The episode closes with gratitude, amphibian calls, and people still trying to hear their planet mates.

As heard by us

A measured, hopeful look at noise pollution as serious ecological harm with unusually direct fixes.

Threshold frames noise pollution as a failure of attention: human sound crowding out the lives, signals, and quiet places around us. The episode begins close to home, with factories, construction, backyards, and the constant movement of people and goods, then follows…

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Why you'd press play

If human noise is starting to feel impossible to ignore, start here.

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