  Scattering events around a supermassive black hole will occasionally toss a
stellar-mass compact object into an orbit around the supermassive black hole,
beginning an extreme mass ratio inspiral. The early stages of such a highly
eccentric orbit will not produce detectable gravitational waves as the source
will only be in a suitable frequency band briefly when it is close to periapsis
during each long-period orbit. This burst of emission, firmly in the millihertz
band is the gravitational wave peep. While a single peep is not likely to be
detectable, if we consider an ensemble of such subthreshold sources, spread
across the universe, together they produce an unresolvable background noise
that may obscure sources otherwise detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space
Antenna, the proposed space-based gravitational wave detector. Previous studies
of the extreme mass ratio burst signal confusion background focused more on
parabolic orbits going very near the supermassive black hole and on events near
the galactic center. We seek to improve this characterization by implementing
numerical kludge waveforms that can calculate highly eccentric orbits with
relativistic effects focusing on orbits which are farther away from the
supermassive black hole and thus less likely to be detectable on their own, but
will otherwise contribute to the background signal confusion noise. Here we
present the waveforms and spectra of the gravitational wave peeps generated
from recent calculations of extreme mass ratio inspirals/bursts capture
parameters and discuss how these can be used to estimate the signal confusion
noise generated by such events.
