Ed Brims / YouTube
Magicians from all over the world were challenged to create a trick that did not rely on sight, touch, smell or taste. The result? Auditory teleportation.
Pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Teleportation from one cage to another. Finding a coin behind a five-year-old’s ear.
Magic has long inspired a sense of awe and wonder, but a part of the population has been left out of fun: blind people.
Let’s think about it. Or “oooh” when the bunny appears out of the hat. The gasp when someone we thought was caged on one side of the stage suddenly appears inside another cage on the stage. other side.
The only reason these tricks work It’s because they cheat our eyes to see something that, just a few seconds ago, seemed impossible. So that a blind person could appreciate any of these tricks, the magicians they would have to completely reinvent them.
And now, someone has done it, says .
In November, dozens of magicians from around the world gathered in Las Vegas for a .
During the conference, MAGIC Lab, a research group at the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, announced the winners of a competition called .
A few months earlier, MAGIC Lab had sent an invitation to present magic tricks that did not depend on vision, of touch, smell or taste, but that evoked amazement only through sound. No verbal cues. No mentalism tricks.
A total of 11 magicians from Europe, India, Japan and the United States performed tricks, but only one stood out for its surprising auditory illusion.
In this trick, which can best be described as a auditory teleportationthe magician appears to magically move from one corner of the room to another, using only sound to trick the audience.
Three magicians performed similar tricks, so the jury, made up of magicians, academics and blind people, decided to reward the three.
For now, there are no plans to perform the magic tricks in front of an audience, but the contest proves that it is possible to create an inclusive magic experience that everyone can enjoy.
The Anatomy of a Magic Trick
Anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film, where Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star as rival magicians in early 20th century London, may have learned that each magic trick is made up of three parts: a promise, turning point and prestige.
These terms are fictional stage illusion practices, likely invented by Nolan and not used by real-life magicians, but are useful for understanding the structure of a magic trick.
For example, the magician first shows something commonlike a dove or a deck of cards. Secondly, the illusionist makes this object do something extraordinary: the dove disappears. Finally, he does the unthinkable: the dove reappears.
This structure is essential for a magic trick successful, but it does not have to involve visual cues.
“I think of magic as a conflict of beliefs between the things we believe are possible and the things we believe we have experienced,” he says. Gustav Kuhnassociate professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth and director of the MAGIC Lab, which studies human behavior and cognition through magic.
“Vision is important in terms of establish what we believe to be truebut it doesn’t have to be the case”, details Kuhn.
Kuhn was a magician before he was an academic. In his two decades of research, Kuhn says that found no magic tricks that depend on auditory cues.
“In principle, magic doesn’t rely on vision, but it’s incredibly difficult to produce a magic trick that relies solely on auditory perception,” he says. “Auditory illusions exist, butpray manipulated in a trickwhich is really exciting.”
The Cone of Confusion
The winning trick is based on a psychological auditory phenomenon known as “cone of confusion“, in which a person cannot determine the exact location of the sound they are hearing.
If you’ve ever found yourself behind the wheel, nervously searching for the siren of an ambulance to know whether to pull over or not, So, have you tried the cone of confusion?.
But this, in itself, is not a magic trick.
For an illusion to count as a magic trick, magicians must create what Kuhn calls “the illusion of impossibility“. It can’t be! it’s what the audience needs to feel for a mere auditory illusion to become a magic trick.
Ed Brimswho performed one of the winning magic tricks, turned the cone of confusion into a magic trick by simulate auditory teleportation to her 10-year-old son, Felix, who was sitting in the middle of a room, blindfolded.
At first, Brims circles around Félix while clinking a spoon in a glass bottle. Félix is asked to indicate where the sound is coming from. Then Brims shuts up and circles around Félix again, making the bottle clink as he steps lightly on a carpeted floor.
When he is behind Félix, he taps the bottle and Félix points back. Rings again when ahead, and Felix keeps pointing back. Brims then reveals his true position by uttering a “fwoomph” which gives the son the illusion that his father has just teleported from behind him.
The “fwoomph” sound is crucial, Brims tells me, because it ensures the magic trick sticks. inclusive until the end.
In the video, Felix can be seen remove the blindfold to make sure that the father is in fact where he said he was, but the “fwoomph” sound, which is different from tinkling, ensures that blind people can understand the revelation without having to rely on vision.
Brims is well aware of the needs of people with low vision. Several years ago, before working as a software engineer for Bloomberg in London, he worked at Google, experimenting with ways to turn bar graphs into music and helping to make graphs “readable” much more captivating than hearing a voice relaying the numbers.
It says that the Brazilian magician Antonio Bourgeois introduced him to the “mess cone” phenomenon at a magic convention in 2022. At the time, Brims didn’t know how to turn it into a magic trick, but when he heard about this contest, started toying with the idea — and arrived at the auditory teleportation trick.
Gustav Kuhn’s team is now planning a second competition, which will broaden the scope somewhat, for which it will invite magicians to perform tricks involving theother senses besides vision — and maybe a little language too.
