Hi Mark, thanks for the response. I followed your advice and implemented something similar to what Robin2 does in Example 5 in this post. However the ticking still persisted.
What solved the issue for me was completely disabling all the debugging messages that the IDE I'm using (vMicro in Visual Studio) sends by default. I tried this after noting that running the same code from the Arduino IDE didn't produce any ticking. I should probably have suspected this was the issue earlier but I'm new to Arduino development so I didn't think of it. Thanks again for responding!