How to Silence Noise Between Words in Audacity

Unwanted background sounds such as breaths, room tone, and microphone hiss between spoken words can distract listeners and lower the quality of your audio. In Audacity, you can eliminate these interruptions either automatically using tools like the Noise Gate and Truncate Silence, or manually using the Silence Audio tool and direct deletion. This guide covers the most efficient methods to mute or remove those unwanted sounds to produce crisp, professional speech tracks.

Method 1: Automatically Mute Noise with a Noise Gate

The Noise Gate plugin automatically silences any audio that falls below a specified volume threshold, leaving the louder spoken words untouched.

  1. Select your audio track by clicking the track header or pressing Ctrl + A (Windows) or Cmd + A (Mac).
  2. Go to the top menu and select Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Gate.
  3. Adjust the Gate threshold: Set this just above the level of the background noise, but below the quietest parts of your speech (typically between -30 dB and -40 dB).
  4. Set the Level reduction: Choose how much to attenuate the noise. Setting this to -100 dB will completely mute the gaps.
  5. Adjust the Attack (around 10–25 ms) so the gate opens quickly when words begin, and the Decay/Release (around 100–250 ms) so the ends of words are not cut off abruptly.
  6. Click Apply.

Method 2: Manually Mute Noise with the Silence Audio Tool

If you only have a few spots to clean up and want complete control without affecting the rest of the track, use the Silence Audio shortcut.

  1. Use the Selection Tool (F1) to highlight the noisy gap between two spoken words.
  2. Press Ctrl + L (Windows) or Cmd + L (Mac), or click the Silence Audio Selection button on the edit toolbar (an icon showing a flat line between two audio peaks).
  3. The selected section will be replaced with pure silence while preserving the original timing of your speech.

Method 3: Delete Gaps Completely to Shorten Pauses

If you prefer to remove the dead space entirely rather than leaving silence, you can cut the gaps out.

Manual Deletion

  1. Highlight the unwanted noise between words using the Selection Tool.
  2. Press the Delete or Backspace key.
  3. The audio to the right will shift left, closing the gap.

Automated Deletion (Truncate Silence)

  1. Select your entire track.
  2. Navigate to Effect > Special > Truncate Silence.
  3. Set the Threshold to a level that detects only the background noise (e.g., -40 dB).
  4. Set the Minimum Duration to specify how long a pause must be before Audacity acts on it (e.g., 0.5 seconds).
  5. Set the Truncate to value to the length you want to compress the pauses down to (e.g., 0.2 seconds).
  6. Click Apply to automatically shorten and clean every long pause across the entire track.

Method 4: Clean Residual Noise with Noise Reduction

If the background noise is consistent throughout both the speech and the pauses, run Audacity's standard Noise Reduction effect before gating or silencing.

  1. Highlight a small section containing only background noise.
  2. Go to Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction.
  3. Click Get Noise Profile.
  4. Select the entire recording (Ctrl + A / Cmd + A).
  5. Open Noise Reduction again, leave the defaults (Noise Reduction: 12 dB, Sensitivity: 6, Frequency Smoothing: 3), and click OK.