Or, asking questions to which I already suspect the answer...

Can anyone come up with a way, either tested or theoretical, for me to silence all ambient audio in the area around the player? For example, the player is walking through the fields west of Whiterun at night. There are cricket chirps, and if you have SoS installed there are random fox barks, etc. The player is being followed by... something... and I want the first indication of that to be that all the crickets go quiet. Preferably all sounds, except maybe the wind and the footsteps of the player.

Now if the sound is being generated by a placed Marker, I can see writing a script that searches out and temporarily disables all audio markers in a given formlist, which is all well and good. But most ambient sounds, particularly crickets, are part of the region's setting and as far as I can tell that can't be changed.

Throwing an invisible static around the player doesn't work. I'm not even sure the game engine occludes by static, but if it does, ambient sounds aren't affected.

Any ideas?

Hrm.
I may have found a way to silence at least cricket and other insect sounds.

In a surprising display of logic and helpfulness, Bethesda set all regions to turn off insect sounds when the weather is snowy. So all I have to do is dupe a couple of Weather objects, flag them as "snow", check the current weather, and set the most similar fake-snow duplicate as the current weather pattern. Bingo, crickets stop. It should work, though I won't be able to test it until later.

Still open to more elegant ideas, though.