BWW Blog: Cheyenne Dalton - Post-Audible Separation

This time last year, I met my friend Anthony Narciso. He was contracted to be the Sound Designer for Playhouse Creatures, a show that I was running sound for. We didn't know it at the time, but we were to become thick as thieves and become the best sound team there has ever been (okay, maybe we're a little biased). We share sound effects, projects, and ideas - a good mark of two Sound Designer best friends. We created a shared dropbox folder - and titled it Anthony and Cheyenne Sing Sound Shanty's. Probably the most important folder we have inside our sound shanty's is our sound dictionary. We've just been taking ordinary words and using them to define events and happenings that we find in the world of sound. For example, the first definition we came up with was for "Smashed," which is defined as "the poor mixing of a track, only possible when patching a fisher price keyboard into a cassette tape recorder and mixed with low quality YouTube," and this definition spawned from a show choir performance in which I received a terribly recorded track to play.

I added one definition this past weekend, because The Foreigner opened last Thursday. This is the first show that I've ever sound designed, and given away the show to the stage manager and the sound computer operator. I usually end up running Qlab myself, and therefore I know every night that I am the one in charge of my mistakes, and I can always take the blame for those. With all this being said, I trust my stage manager and my sound crew. I trust that they will call the cue correctly, and I trust that the cue will fire correctly. But there's still a kind of tension that comes with leaving my show behind.

The phrase that I came up with is "Post Audible Separation," which I defined as "the feeling of leaving your first designed show in the hands of virtual strangers who don't care about the integrity of your sound design." This show is my favorite show, and it's been my favorite sound design, and it's been my favorite tech process. I have been truly blessed in this show, and so it's clear as to why I am hesitant to leave it in the hands of people who were not on the journey of sound with me the past four months.

I saw the show on opening night alone, and I'm seeing it midweek this week with a friend, and on closing with my parents. Seeing it alone let me reflect on the show, how my sound affected the show, and what I could improve next time. I didn't harp too much on the last bit, because I really am proud of this design, but I do realize there's always room for change. Just as Charlie says in the show, "We're making one another complete, and alive, and I can't explain it, but I shall miss them. I shall miss them terribly."