Welcome to a new section of this blog. We are leaving the world of audience psychology, scripting, and effect selection behind — at least for a while — and entering the territory that most performers ignore until it bites them: production and environment.
Everything we have discussed up to this point assumed a kind of idealized performance scenario. You have your routine. You have your script. You have your practice hours logged and your material polished. You step on stage, and the magic happens.
Except it does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a room. A specific room, with specific acoustics, specific lighting, a specific layout, specific equipment, and a specific set of environmental factors that either support your performance or silently sabotage it. And the single most important of those environmental factors — the one that will destroy your show faster and more thoroughly than any other production failure — is sound.
The Graz Disaster
I learned this the hard way at a corporate event in Graz about two years into my keynote speaking journey. I had been invited to deliver a talk for roughly eighty people at a conference venue — a renovated industrial space that the organizers described as “modern and atmospheric.” They were right about the atmospheric part. High ceilings, exposed brick, steel beams. It looked beautiful. It was an acoustic nightmare.
I arrived thirty minutes before my time slot. The previous speaker had just finished. There was no dedicated sound technician — just a basic PA system that someone from the venue staff had set up earlier that day. I was handed a lavalier microphone, clipped it on, did a quick “testing, testing” that sounded fine from where I was standing, and figured I was good.
I was not good.
About three minutes into my talk, I could see it in the audience’s faces. People in the back rows were leaning forward. A few had their hands cupped behind their ears. Others had that glazed expression that means they have stopped trying to follow what you are saying and have retreated into their own thoughts. The exposed brick walls and high steel ceiling were bouncing my amplified voice around the room in a way that turned every sentence into a muddled echo of itself. The words arrived at the back of the room as a kind of reverberant mush.
I raised my voice. That made it worse — more volume meant more echo. I moved closer to the front row, which helped the people sitting there but abandoned the back third of the room entirely. I tried slowing down, which helped a little, but the damage was already done. The connection I had worked so hard to build in the first few minutes was broken, and I spent the rest of the performance trying to rebuild it with half the room unable to hear me clearly.
The effects I performed that day were some of the best material in my repertoire. The scripting was tight. The routines were polished. None of it mattered. The audience could not hear me, and everything else collapsed as a consequence.
The Invisible Foundation
Here is what I have come to understand about sound, and it took me far too long to learn it: sound is not a feature of your performance. Sound is the foundation of your performance. Every single element of your show that involves communication — which is to say, every single element of your show — depends on the audience being able to hear you clearly, naturally, and without effort.
Your script? Meaningless if they cannot hear the words. Your callbacks and running gags? Gone if half the room missed the setup. Your audience management and volunteer interactions? Impossible when people are straining to understand what you are saying. Your emotional arc, your pauses for dramatic effect, your carefully timed reveals? All of it requires the audience to be receiving your voice as a clean, intelligible signal, not as an approximation filtered through bad acoustics and inadequate amplification.
Dan Harlan makes this point powerfully in his lecture on treating magic as theatre. He places sound in the “animate” category of theatrical elements — it is alive, it moves, it changes throughout a performance. It is not static set dressing. It is an active, living component of the show that either serves you or fights you in every moment.
And yet most performers — myself very much included, for too long — treat sound as an afterthought. We spend hundreds of hours on technique. We agonize over script phrasing. We obsess over the visual presentation of our effects. Then we show up to a venue, accept whatever audio setup is there, clip on whatever microphone we are handed, and hope for the best.
What Bad Sound Actually Costs You
The insidious thing about bad sound is that the audience does not think “the sound is bad.” The audience thinks “this performer is bad.”
They cannot separate the medium from the message. If your words are arriving garbled, they do not consciously attribute that to room acoustics or speaker placement or microphone quality. They experience it as confusion, and they attribute the confusion to you. You seem unclear. You seem unprepared. You seem less compelling than you actually are.
This is especially devastating for magic performance, where so much depends on precise verbal direction. When I am guiding a volunteer through an effect, every word matters. If I say “hold the card face down” and they hear “hold the card,” the entire sequence can derail. If I am building suspense with a carefully scripted build and the audience loses two words in the middle of a key sentence, the emotional trajectory flattens. The surprise still happens, but it lands on an audience that was not properly set up for it.
I have watched recordings of performances where the magic was excellent and the audience reaction was muted, and the single biggest variable was sound quality. Same performer, same material, same rough audience size — but in one room the voice was clear and present and in the other it was fighting the acoustics. The difference in audience engagement was dramatic.
The Hotel Room Revelation
Ironically, some of my best practice happened in hotel rooms precisely because the acoustics in those small spaces were nearly perfect. When I was running through my scripting alone in a hotel room in Vienna or Salzburg, talking through my patter while working through the physical routine, I could hear every nuance of my own voice. The pacing felt natural. The pauses landed where I intended them.
Then I would take that same material into a conference room or event space and wonder why it felt different. Why the pacing seemed off, why the pauses felt awkward rather than dramatic, why the words that had sounded so natural in practice now felt stilted and forced. For a long time, I attributed this to performance anxiety or the gap between practice and live conditions.
And some of it was. But a significant portion of it was simply that the acoustic environment had changed, and I had not adapted to it. In the hotel room, I was hearing my voice directly. In the venue, I was hearing a version of my voice that had been transformed by the room, the amplification system, and the distance to the audience. It was, quite literally, a different sound — and that different sound changed everything about how the performance felt, both to me and to the audience.
What Changed
The transformation in my approach started after the Graz experience. I began treating sound not as something that happens to you, but as something you actively manage. The shift was from passive acceptance to active ownership.
This meant several concrete changes. First, I started arriving at venues significantly earlier — not thirty minutes before, but hours when possible. Not to set up my effects, which take minutes, but to understand the room. How does the space sound? Where are the speakers positioned? What happens when someone speaks from the performance area — does the voice carry cleanly, or does it bounce and blur?
Second, I started paying attention to what the sound equipment actually was. Not in a technical engineering sense — I am not an audio professional — but in a basic awareness sense. Is this a professional PA system or a portable speaker someone brought from home? Is the microphone wired or wireless? Is there a sound technician running a board, or is it set-and-forget? These questions tell you an enormous amount about what your voice is going to sound like when you start performing.
Third, and most importantly, I started doing real sound checks. Not the thirty-second “testing, testing” I had been doing, but a proper process where I actually speak at performance volume and have someone sit in various parts of the audience area and tell me how it sounds. This single change has prevented more problems than any other adjustment I have made to my live performance process.
The Grandmother in the Back Row
There is a technique Harlan describes for non-amplified situations that I have found useful even when amplification is available. He calls it the grandmother technique: you visualize that your grandmother is sitting in the back row, center seat, and you perform the entire show just for her.
The beauty of this mental image is that it naturally adjusts everything. You project without shouting. You articulate without being stilted. You slow down just enough. You make sure every word lands, because your grandmother is sitting back there and you want her to hear every single thing.
I have adapted this for amplified situations by changing the question from “can she hear me?” to “can she hear me clearly and comfortably?” Volume is not the same as clarity. You can be loud enough to reach the back row while still being too muddled for anyone to follow comfortably. The grandmother technique reminds you that reach is not enough — intelligibility is what matters.
The Universal Principle
Here is what makes this relevant far beyond magic performance. Every presenter, every speaker, every teacher, every leader who stands in front of a group and communicates is subject to the same dynamics. Sound is the carrier wave of human connection. When it is right, it is invisible — the audience experiences only you and your message. When it is wrong, it becomes a barrier that no amount of content quality can overcome.
I have sat in conference rooms as a strategy consultant listening to brilliant analysts deliver important findings through cheap table microphones in echoey rooms, and watched their credibility diminish in real time as the audience struggled to hear them. The content was excellent. The delivery was competent. The sound was terrible. And the sound won.
My approach now is simple: sound first, everything else second. Before I think about my opening line, before I set up my effects, before I worry about any other element of the performance, I make sure the audience is going to be able to hear me. Because if they cannot hear me, nothing else I do matters.
This is the foundation of everything we will explore in this section on production and environment. The physical space, the equipment, the lighting, the staging — all of it shapes how your performance lands. And sound is where it starts.
Get the sound right, and everything you have built has a chance to reach the audience the way you intended. Get it wrong, and your best trick, your best line, your best moment — all of it disappears into the acoustic void between you and the person who came to see you perform.
I wish someone had told me that before Graz.