Two points:

First off, rather than trying to build another clock/alarm wake up program, I suggest working out this feature and then contributing it towards ciroip's awesome FlipClock app (it's written in Python so adding extra stuff isn't very hard); I think he's still working on it, though he swears about once a day that he's not a programmer and is playing around with it more than anything else. Still a good app though with lots of room for additions/enhancements.
Secondly, as far as audio checks go, I built an app in C that reads the input level of the microphone and can perform tasks based on what that level is (i.e. how much noise the mic pics up), but it's based on alsa libraries and I don't remember if Maemo actually utilizes Alsa or not... I know there's some old ESD implementation, but I don't know if ALSA is underlying that, or? Of course if there was a way to do it from python itself that might be a better solution, but I'm not a big python guy... programmer, yes, python, not so familiar with it.