Close your eyes and imagine you hear a sound, someone’s voice, coming from your left side. It will slowly come from behind you and then move to your right. It goes round and round. Suddenly, a voice jumps out. It was clearly right in front of me, but now it’s coming from somewhere else. How did we get there? Did it… magically jump?
That’s the premise of the winning magic announced on November 13th. contest We create magical experiences based solely on sound. The challenge, proposed by British researchers a few months ago, is part of an effort to answer a simple question: Can magic tricks, which typically rely on surprising visual elements, be witnessed using just the ear?
“Imagine a world where you never heard music,” says Gustav Kuhn, a magician turned psychologist at the University of Plymouth. According to him, this may be what magic tricks are for the visually impaired.
Kuhn studies magic to understand the human mind (SN: October 20, 2009). “Many of the questions that psychologists are interested in are right at the heart of magic: perception, consciousness, but also free will and how we can influence people’s decisions and beliefs. ” he says.
His interest in non-visual magic was sparked last year by his student, Tyler Gibgot, who is visually impaired. Gibgot’s childhood birthday celebrations included magical performances for his friends. “I was the only one in the corner who didn’t pay attention to the trick because I couldn’t see what was going on,” Gibgot says.
Gibgot wasn’t able to see the magic tricks as a child, but he became interested after hearing the awed shrieks of his friends. He taught himself card tricks and studied cognitive science in college to learn how magicians manipulate people’s perceptions of reality, which led him to work with Kuhn.
This contest is also an effort to make Magic more inclusive for people like Gibgot. But it’s also a scientific pursuit. Why does magic rarely involve hearing?.
According to Kuhn, the lack of a magic trick to hearing shows that there is a fundamental difference between how our minds encode sight and sound. “We don’t know why there’s that difference.” One reason is that our eyes continuously give us information about the world, but the information our ears convey is fleeting. That’s it.
“Sounds appear and disappear all the time…but that’s not magic. If a rabbit appears and disappears, that’s magic,” Kuhn says.
At the heart of all magic is conflict. We believe something is impossible, but our senses tell us that it is happening. “We tend to trust our hearing less than our sense of sight, so our hearing may not be powerful enough to cause this kind of conflict,” Kuhn says. Humans are visual creatures, so we are more surprised when we are fooled by our senses than by our senses.
Traditional magic that requires hearing, such as ringing a silent bell, is supported by other senses or relies on language. All 11 entries to the contest were language dependent to some degree. Kuhn admits that auditory magic without language may not even be possible.
Kuhn plans to restart the contest next year and expand the scope to include all non-visual subjects, not just sound. And he expects future submissions to push the envelope even further.
Non-visual magic projects “bring a sense of empowerment to people like me,” Gibgot says.
In this year’s contest, three independent magicians who submit tricks using the same principle will share a $200 prize.
