That's an interesting question about the sound of ice growing on a lake. One of our local lakes actually plays a pretty impressive symphony of actual musical tones much like the sound effects in movies of ricocheting bullets. Cracks can run a mile or more.
What I just came across this weekend on Youtube was a guy who had an underwater camera near the lake bottom while whitefish fishing. There were no fish on the video screen at the start. He needed to drill another hole for his camera with his power auger and wondered if it would spook the fish. You can hear the engine running in the background and the screen starts filling with whitefish swimming through the area in a big school right towards the noise. They seem to
"come a running" to the location of the sound of the drilling much like a Kodiak brown bear comes running to a deer hunter's rifle shot knowing that there will be a steaming gut pile waiting for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLcIBl3VmsoWith the cracking being such a normal thing I'd think it probably is just background noise to fish that they ignore.
