Clicky Icky

Watching for

Thresholds need re-setting

Matching now scores half on what a sound's spectrum is and half on how it changes, which tells a sound apart from a busy room several times better — but it moved the scale. A real match now lands around 0.6–0.9 rather than 0.9–1.0, so a threshold you settled before this is set too high and will miss things.

Measure the room below to set them again. Unlock any you have locked first — measuring leaves those alone on purpose.

Got it

Too many false alarms

A false alarm is the room scoring high. Clicky Icky can measure how high: it listens for ten seconds while you keep the trigger sound quiet, and sets each threshold above whatever the room managed on its own. Do it where the phone will actually sit.

Measure the room (10s)

When it hears one

Flash the screen Play a sound Vibrate Post a notification Keep screen awake

Countdown after a detection

Take over the screen with a countdown

Each detection counts down one stage, then arms the next. Leave a box empty to skip it.

Stop after

Event log

Plain text

Select all and copy anywhere — CSV opens in any spreadsheet. The log keeps the most recent 1000 events; export before a long run if you need every one.

Sensitivity

Noise gate — how far above the room's noise floor a sound must be Minimum gap between events Re-learn room noise

Install

Version

Check for update

Alert check

If something here does not fire, see Help.

Backup

Clicky Icky's own backup format, not audio.

Danger zone

Delete all sounds, log and settings

Getting started

1. Sounds → hold Hold to record, make the sound, let go. Or Import from an audio file to teach it from an mp3.
2. Add a few more takes of the same sound — loud, quiet, from across the room. Three or more, and a sound has to look like at least two of them before it counts, so takes make it both harder to miss and harder to fool. Hold only as long as the sound lasts: a template padded with silence is partly a fingerprint of your room.
3. Listen → tick the sounds to watch for → Start listening.

Use Test without logging first. The score bar next to each sound shows how well this moment matches, with a marker at the threshold. Make the sound and watch where it peaks; make some other noise and watch where that peaks; set the threshold between the two.

The four alerts

Vibration on Android

There are two different vibrations, with different settings, and this is the thing that confuses everyone.

Clicky Icky's own buzz is classed by Android as touch feedback, so it only fires when Touch feedback is on under Sound & vibration — the same setting that makes your keyboard buzz. Web pages cannot use a different class. With it off, Clicky Icky's buzz can never fire and the buzz style setting changes nothing.

The notification's buzz is classed as a notification, so it works with Touch feedback off. It is the only way to buzz in the background. Clicky Icky cannot set it — Android does, per site:

1. Post one notification first (Setup → Alert check). The channel does not exist until the site has sent one.
2. Android → Apps → Chrome → Notifications
3. Find clickyicky.buildaffect.com → turn on its vibration.

The same channel sets the notification's sound, and the two are separate switches — you can have the buzz without the sound. Android's built-in notification tones can only be chosen there, not in Clicky Icky: a web page cannot read system ringtone files.

If nothing buzzes at all, check silent mode, Do Not Disturb and battery saver.

Countdown

Each detection counts down one stage, and the next detection uses the next: click → 5s, click → 10s, click → 15s. The screen runs yellow to red and flashes when the time elapses. The last stage repeats.

If the ladder gets ahead of what you are timing — it heard something that was not the one you meant, or missed one — ‹ Back and Next › run a different stage straight away, rather than making you wait the current one out. × closes the overlay and leaves the ladder where it is; Reset closes it, puts the ladder back to the first stage and drops the gap still running after the last detection, so the next sound is heard whenever it comes rather than after the rest of a wait that no longer means anything. Each session starts fresh anyway.

Missing sounds, or false alarms

Match threshold (Listen, per sound) is how close a match has to be. Raise it for fewer false alarms, lower it for fewer misses. Once it is right, Lock it — the slider sits under your thumb on a list you scroll, and a nudged threshold leaves a sound looking armed and correct while matching at a number you did not choose.

Setting it, when there are false alarms. Under each sound is fired at — the score of every recent detection, newest first. Run Test without logging, make the real sound a few times among whatever is setting it off, and read the row: the real ones cluster high, the false ones lower. Put the threshold between the two clusters. If they overlap, no threshold will separate them and the sound needs a take that captures what makes it distinctive.

Minimum gap between events (Setup) is how long after a detection the same sound is ignored for, up to 30 seconds. Use it when one real event makes several noises — a doorbell pressed twice, a dog barking in bursts — and you want one log line rather than five. Each sound has its own gap; the badge counts down so a deliberate silence does not look like a fault.

Noise gate (Setup) is how far above the room's own noise a sound must be before Clicky Icky considers it at all. Raise it if quiet room noise trips it, lower it if faint sounds are missed. Re-learn room noise resets the tracker after the room changes.

Start with the best score. Beside each sound's live score is the best it has reached this session. Make the sound a few times and read that number instead of trying to watch the bar. Over the threshold and green means it has matched, so anything missing is the gap or the noise gate below. Well under it means the takes do not cover the sound as it actually arrives — add one recorded from where it happens, at that distance and volume. Reset count clears it to start measuring again.

It matched and nothing happened. Under each sound, Clicky Icky counts the matches it threw away and says what threw them. Matches inside the gap are the gap doing what you asked — shorten it if each of those should have counted. Matches below the noise gate are a misconfiguration: the score is worked out whatever the volume, but a sound under the gate is never acted on, so lower the gate or add a take from where the sound actually is.

For a sound you cannot make on demand. Metal ticking as it warms, a fault that shows twice a night — a session that logged nothing means either that it never happened or that it missed by a hundredth, and those want opposite responses. Clicky Icky records what came close: near misses, how close, and when. If one landed just under the threshold, that was almost certainly the real thing, and the threshold goes just under it.

Together with the best score, that covers every way a detection can fail to arrive: it never matched, it matched and the gap held it, it matched and the gate dropped it, or it detected and the alert did not reach you — check Alert check on Setup for the last one.

Takes recorded as separate sounds. If you taught the same noise twice and ended up with two entries, Move into… on the Sounds tab makes one a take of the other. Two takes of one sound match far better than two sounds competing. Split out on a take undoes it. The sound you move into keeps its own threshold.

A sound taught on one device may score lower on another — different microphone, different fingerprint. Re-record takes per device.

Installing

Chrome menu (⋮) → Add to Home screen, or the Install button in the header when Chrome offers it. After you uninstall, Chrome stops offering the prompt for a long while — the menu route still works. Clicky Icky runs perfectly well as an ordinary tab; installing only adds the icon and removes the address bar.

Installed, it resumes from memory and can keep running an old build. Setup → Version shows which, with a button to force an update.

Privacy

• Audio is analysed on the audio thread and discarded window by window. No recording is ever kept, on disk or in memory.
• Only 110 Hz – 11 kHz is examined; everything outside that range is dropped before anything is stored or compared.
• A saved sound is 28 normalised loudness numbers per 10 ms — a shape, not a recording. It cannot be played back or turned into speech.
• Clicky Icky makes no network requests. It works with the device offline and has no analytics.

Limits worth knowing

• With the screen off or Clicky Icky swiped away, Android may suspend it and detection stops. Keep the screen awake and the device plugged in for long runs.
• Another app with exclusive use of the microphone can starve Clicky Icky. Test against your own call setup before relying on it.
• Log timestamps lag the event by roughly the template's length, 100–300 ms, because a match is only confirmed once the sound has finished arriving.
• Two clicks of the same mechanism are hard to tell apart, by design.