clicks with onset and offset of tones

[Cathym10]

hi,

i'm a researcher and have designed an experiment in e-primev2 that presents auditory tones as stimuli.

i created these with audacity and saved them as .wav files. the problem i have when playing the tones back are horrible clicks at onset and offset. can i use audacity to modify the sound files to prevent the clicks? if so how?

thanks in advance

Cathym

[steve]

can i use audacity to modify the sound files to prevent the clicks?

Yes - zoom in close on the beginning of a tone, select the first tiny bit of the tone and apply a fade-in.

[Cathym10]

Great. Thanks, this works.

C

[kozikowski]

<<<i'm a researcher and have designed an experiment in e-primev2 that presents auditory tones as stimuli.>>>

Since you're not a casual user, do you know why the tones did that? It's not accidental or a bug in Audacity. If you listen to a steady pure tone, you will hear that tone and, given a quiet room, nothing else. If you listen to silence, same thing. Just complete absence of tone.

If you start or stop a tone, the instant the tone changes, either getting bigger or smaller, the sound becomes intensely distorted and you hear the original tone plus large amounts of distortion which you hear as a click or pop.

You can fade into our out of a tone and suppress that click or pop, but it never completely goes away. The slower you fade, the less the distortion and the lower the click (and the messier the tone sounds).

Tone burst tests and research have been saddled with this problem for years. Are you hearing the tone or are you hearing the distortion garbage before and after (which can be louder)?

Koz