Low latency recorder chops off short recordings

Antje

Hello,

I use OpenSesame 4 and experience a strange issue: In my task, participants are prompted to produce vowels in isolation (duration more or less 200ms). For some reason, the recording only starts halfway into the vowel production, removing the first bit (but there is silence with a bit of background noise recorded before the production starts, so it cannot be a timing issue). When recording full words, there is no issue. The problem persists on different computers and using different recording devices. Did anyone experience something similar and has a solution to offer?

Many thanks in advance,

Antje

cvanbuck

Hi @Antje,

That’s a strange issue... Since background noise is recorded before the vowel, it doesn’t seem to be a timing problem indeed. Does the recording always start exactly halfway into the vowel production?

To investigate why the system is cutting off the initial part of the vowels, you could try making a small sound (like a soft "uh") just before the vowel, or try increasing the recording duration slightly (e.g., to match the duration for words) and see if that helps.

If it doesn’t solve the issue, then I’m not sure without seeing your experiment design. Are you using the same setup for words and vowels, or are they in different sequences/loops? If you’d like, I can take a look at your experiment file.

Let me know how it goes!

Claire

Antje

Dear @cvanbuck ,

Thank you so much for your message.

I cannot tell if the recording always starts exactly halfway into the vowel production. I can just say for sure that it does not start at the beginning.

Increasing the vowel duration helps indeed, which makes me believe that it is an issue caused by recording short speech fragments like vowels that are usually somewhere between 150 and 250 ms in duration.

In the end, changing the back-end seems to have helped. Interestingly, I could not replicate the problem on my Mac (the problem only occurred on different Windows computers).

Thanks for your help!

Antje