Using pyaudio to stop recording under certain sound threshold

[Twanski94]

Heads up, this is my first real programming project, but I'm really dedicated to making it work and would love some input.

I've written a program to attempt to record sound using Pyaudio and then halt the recording once the sound intensity has dropped under a certain threshold. To do this, I took the audio data, turned it into integer data, averaged the chunks of data collected by the program, and then set the program to halt after it dropped below a threshold that I picked after some trial and error. The issue is that, the averages of the data clusters don't seem to actually correlate to the intensity of the audio input, and it sometimes drops below the threshold and halts recording even when there is significant input (eg, constant music playing). Below is the code:

import pyaudio
import struct
import wave
    
def record(outputFile):
#defining audio variables
    chunk = 1024
    FORMAT = pyaudio.paInt16
    CHANNELS = 1
    RATE = 44100
    Y = 100
    
#Calling pyadio module and starting recording 
    p = pyaudio.PyAudio()

    stream = p.open(format=FORMAT,
                channels=CHANNELS, 
                rate=RATE, 
                input=True,
                frames_per_buffer=chunk)

    stream.start_stream()
    print("Starting!")

#Recording data until under threshold
    frames=[]
    
    while True:
        #Converting chunk data into integers
        data = stream.read(chunk)
        data_int = struct.unpack(str(2*chunk) +'B', data)
        #Finding average intensity per chunk
        avg_data=sum(data_int)/len(data_int)
        print(str(avg_data))
        #Recording chunk data
        frames.append(data)
        if avg_data < Y:
            break
        
#Stopping recording   
    stream.stop_stream()
    stream.close()
    p.terminate()
    print("Ending recording!")
   
    
#Saving file with wave module    
    wf = wave.open(outputFile, 'wb')
    wf.setnchannels(CHANNELS)
    wf.setsampwidth(p.get_sample_size(FORMAT))
    wf.setframerate(RATE)
    wf.writeframes(b''.join(frames))
    wf.close()
    
record('outputFile1.wav')