By recording the noise of crinkled wrappers as they were

hi

this is my explanation:

By recording the noise of crinkled wrappers as they were slowly stretched out in an otherwise silent chamber, and then digitizing and analyzing the sound emissions on computers, a team of scientists found the noise not continuous but consisted of individual bursts or pops just thousandths of a second long.

let's understand the structure of the sentence:
-> By recording the noise of crinkled wrappers as they were slowly stretched out in an otherwise silent chamber (-ing modifier)
-> and then digitizing and analyzing the sound emissions on computers (another -ing modifier, which should be parallel to the first one)
these two modifiers modify the subject "a team of scientists"

3rd clause -> a team of scientists found the noise not continuous but consisted of individual bursts or pops just thousandths of a second long.


Now we can understand that a team of scientists found smth
they found that noise is consisted of bursts or pops ...
they found this by recording & then digitizing & analyzing the sound.

This sentence tests the correct use of modifiers, idioms, "be, being", and parallelism.


now let's get to POE:


(A) digitizing and analyzing the sound emissions on computers, a team of scientists found the noise not
the modifier is parallel to the first -ing modifier, both modifiers refer to "a team of scientists". Analysing the meaning, we see that a team of scientists found the noise. This is illogical! We need a that clause to introduce what they found. + not continuous but consisted - parallelism error

(B) digitizing and analyzing the sound emissions on computers, a team of scientists found that the noise was not
This is the correct answer. The second -ing modifier is parallel to the first one. Both of them refer to "a team of scientists". "That" correctly introduces a new clause which explains what the team has found. Moreover, the idiom "not x but y" is correctly used: was not continuous but consisted.

(C) digitizing and analyzing the sound emissions on computers, a team of scientists found the noise not to be
the modifier is parallel to the first -ing modifier. A team of scientists found.. found what? the noise? this is illogical, we need to introduce a new clause to explain what the team has found. Using the "not to be" is awkward, furthermore it is not parallel with "but consisted", which is not in the underlined portion.

(D) the sound emissions were digitized and analyzed on computers, a team of scientists found that the noise was not
the modifier is not parallel to the first modifier, which is an -ing one, hence the answer choice is incorrect.

(E) the sound emissions were digitized and analyzed on computers, a team of scientists found the noise not to be
same error as in answer choice D.