Use sox from SoX to analyze a short audio sample:

sox -t .wav "|arecord -d 2" -n stat

With -t .wav we specify we process the wav type, "|arecord -d 2" executes the arecord program for two seconds, -n outputs to the null file and with stat we specify we want statistics.

The output of this command, on my system with some background speech, is:

Recording WAVE 'stdin' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono Samples read: 16000 Length (seconds): 2.000000 Scaled by: 2147483647.0 Maximum amplitude: 0.312500 Minimum amplitude: -0.421875 Midline amplitude: -0.054688 Mean norm: 0.046831 Mean amplitude: -0.000044 RMS amplitude: 0.068383 Maximum delta: 0.414063 Minimum delta: 0.000000 Mean delta: 0.021912 RMS delta: 0.036752 Rough frequency: 684 Volume adjustment: 2.370

The maximum amplitude can then be extracted via:

grep -e "RMS.*amplitude" | tr -d ' ' | cut -d ':' -f 2

We grep for the line we want, use tr to trim away the space characters and then cut it by the : character and take the second part which gives us 0.068383 in this example. As suggested by comments, RMS is a better measure of energy than maximum amplitude.

You can finally use bc on the result to compare floating-point values from the command-line:

if (( $(echo "$value > $threshold" | bc -l) )) ; # ...

If you build a loop (see Bash examples) that calls sleep for 1 minute, tests the volume, and then repeats, you can leave it running in the background. The last step is to add it to the init scripts or service files (depending on your OS / distro), such that you do not even have to launch it manually.