When you can hear every word, thank the sound mixers

Ninety minutes before curtain on a recent Tuesday evening, Garth MacAleavey, the sound designer and sound mixer of the Broadway musical Illinoise, went through his checklist.

“I'm going to run pink noise through every speaker. Make sure everything's working,” MacAleavey said. Pink noise is “all of the audible frequencies of the human ear, all the same amplitude. So, we're getting everything from, I guess, 20Hz to 20,000Hz.”