Glossary → Audio engineering
Audio engineering
Noise gate
A noise gate mutes audio when it falls below a threshold, silencing the background between phrases while leaving speech untouched.
Gates clean up breaths, mouse clicks and room hiss between sentences, but a mis-set threshold chops quiet word endings — the telltale 'gated' sound. Modern AI noise suppression has replaced gating for many voice workflows.
Related terms
Noise floorThe noise floor is the constant background level present in a recording when nobody is speaking — room tone, e…
Speech enhancementSpeech enhancement cleans a voice recording — suppressing noise, reducing reverb, restoring clarity — using mo…
Room toneRoom tone is the 'silence' of a recording space — its constant ambient character — deliberately recorded so ed…