The moment I said “Could you come up and join me on stage?” everything stopped.
It was a corporate awards evening in Klagenfurt. About two hundred people in a banquet hall. I was performing a mentalism piece that required an audience volunteer, and I had chosen my participant during the pre-show — a friendly woman from the marketing department who had seemed genuinely enthusiastic when I chatted with her before dinner.
She stood up from her table, and then the walk began. Her table was about fifteen meters from the stage. Not far, in objective distance. But in performance time, those fifteen meters stretched into an eternity. She had to push her chair back. Stand up. Edge past two colleagues. Navigate between tables. Cross the open floor. Find the steps at the side of the stage. Climb the steps. Walk to where I was standing.
During all of this, I was on stage doing nothing.
I smiled. I gestured encouragingly. I said something along the lines of “Come on up, no rush.” But the audience could feel the energy draining from the room with every second of the walk. The momentum I had built over the previous ten minutes was evaporating in real time, and I had nothing to fill the gap because I had not thought about this transition as a design problem.
The walk took about twenty seconds. Twenty seconds does not sound like much, but try standing on a stage in silence for twenty seconds while someone walks toward you. It is enough time for the entire room to lose focus. People check their phones. Side conversations start. The collective attention that you worked so hard to earn scatters, and you have to spend the first minute of the next routine gathering it all back.
Dan Harlan has a term for this. He calls it dead time.
Dead Time Is the Enemy
In his lecture on magic as theatre, Harlan draws a critical distinction between process and dead time. Process is the necessary sequence of steps that a routine requires — borrowing a ring, placing it in a container, building the suspense. Process can be made interesting through interaction, character, script, context. It is the journey of the performance, and even though it is not the magical moment itself, it is part of the theatrical experience.
Dead time is different. Dead time is when the audience can see that nothing meaningful is happening. No progress toward the effect. No entertainment. Just waiting. Harlan is blunt: “Doesn’t matter how active you are on stage. If it doesn’t make sense, dead time.”
Walking off stage to find a volunteer is dead time. Walking a volunteer back to their seat is dead time. Any moment where the audience is watching something with no narrative purpose or forward momentum actively damages the show’s energy.
Scott Alexander makes the same point from a different angle. He warns that too much audience participation kills pacing: “It takes time for grandma to hobble her way up onstage and then hobble back down.” When leaving the stage to go into the audience, he says, keep it brief, maintain command, and consider background music to sustain energy.
Background music. That was the solution I had been missing.
Play-On Music: The Walk-Up Energy Bridge
Play-on music is the track that plays when a volunteer is walking from their seat to the stage. Its purpose is simple: fill the dead time with energy, maintain the room’s momentum, and make the transition feel like a deliberate part of the show rather than an awkward gap.
The first time I used play-on music for a volunteer walk-up, the difference was so dramatic that I could not believe I had ever performed without it. It was a conference in Salzburg, about three months after the Klagenfurt lesson. Same kind of venue, same approximate audience size, same type of routine requiring a volunteer.
This time, the moment I invited the volunteer to join me, the music kicked in. An upbeat, energetic track with a clear pulse. The audience immediately responded — not to the volunteer, but to the music. The energy in the room, instead of draining, actually increased. People clapped along. Some cheered the volunteer as she made her way to the stage. The walk, which in Klagenfurt had felt like an interruption, in Salzburg felt like a celebration.
The volunteer herself walked differently. Instead of the self-conscious shuffle of someone navigating a silent room under two hundred gazes, she moved with a certain swagger. The music gave her permission to enjoy the walk.
By the time she reached the stage, the room was buzzing. The energy was already there, carried by the music through the transition. I could launch directly into the routine without spending a minute re-establishing engagement.
Play-Off Music: The Walk-Back Acknowledgment
If play-on music is important, play-off music might be even more so. Because when the routine is done and the volunteer has to walk back to their seat, you face a different kind of dead time — one that carries additional emotional complexity.
The volunteer has just been part of something extraordinary. They stood on stage, participated in an impossible experience, and are now returning to their seat carrying that experience with them. The audience has just watched this happen and is processing their own reactions. This is an emotionally charged moment, and the transition needs to honor that charge while also clearing the space for whatever comes next.
Without music, the volunteer walks back in silence. The applause fades, and then there is an awkward gap while they navigate back to their table. The moment ends not with a punctuation mark but with a trailing ellipsis.
With play-off music, the walk-back becomes a victory lap. The audience keeps clapping as long as the music plays, which means the volunteer receives sustained acknowledgment instead of a brief burst that fades into silence.
Alexander talks about the importance of how you treat volunteers — the whispered thank-you, the courtesy of helping them on and off stage, the way your handling communicates something about your character to the entire audience. Play-off music is an extension of this principle. It says, through the production design of your show, that you value this person’s participation enough to give their exit its own musical moment.
Practical Implementation
The logistics of play-on and play-off music are simpler than you might think, but they require planning.
First, you need to choose the tracks. Play-on music should be energetic enough to maintain momentum but not so overwhelming that it competes with what you are saying. You will probably be talking over the play-on music — calling the volunteer up, making welcoming comments, setting up the routine. The music needs to sit underneath your voice, supporting the energy without dominating the soundscape.
Play-off music can be louder and more prominent, because you are usually not speaking during the walk-back. The audience is applauding, the volunteer is moving, and the music is the primary sonic element. This is the track that can be more emotionally punchy, more celebratory, more of a statement.
Second, you need a cueing system. Harlan mentions hands-free controllers for music cues — devices that allow you to trigger tracks without reaching for a phone or a remote control. This matters for play-on and play-off music because the timing needs to be precise. The play-on music should start the instant you invite the volunteer, not three seconds later after you fumble with a device. The play-off music should start as the applause begins, not after a beat of silence.
I work with the venue’s AV technician whenever possible. We agree on cues in advance during the sound check. When I say a specific phrase — “Come on up and join me” — that is the cue for play-on music. When I shake the volunteer’s hand at the end of the routine, that is the cue for play-off music. The cues are verbal and physical, clearly identifiable, so the technician does not have to guess.
At smaller events where I am running my own sound, I use a wireless controller clipped to my belt. A single tap triggers the next track in the sequence. This gives me full control over timing but requires me to remember the cue points, which is why they are built into my script and rehearsed like any other element of the show.
Third, you need to think about volume curves. The play-on music starts at a moderate volume and stays there until the volunteer reaches the stage, at which point it fades down so I can speak clearly. The play-off music starts at moderate volume and can stay there or even swell slightly as the volunteer walks back, then fades as I transition to the next piece. These volume changes need to be smooth and deliberate — abrupt volume shifts feel like technical errors and break the audience’s sense of flow.
The Dead Time Audit
After I discovered the power of play-on and play-off music, I went through my entire set and identified every moment of dead time. Not just volunteer transitions, but every gap where the audience was watching me do something without entertainment value.
I found more dead time than I expected — reaching for props, adjusting a stand, waiting for technology to respond. Each gap was a small energy leak, and over forty minutes, the leaks added up.
Not all dead time needs music. Harlan gives a beautiful example of solving it with patter: instead of silently walking to get a table, you say “I’d like to show you something kind of interesting and for that I’m going to need this table” while already moving. But for volunteer walk-ups and walk-backs specifically, music is the ideal solution.
What the Music Communicates About You
There is a meta-message in all of this that I did not fully appreciate until I had been using play-on and play-off music for several months. The music does not just fill dead time. It communicates something about the kind of show you are running.
A show with carefully timed music cues for every transition tells the audience that this performer has thought about every second of the experience. That nothing is left to chance. That even the moments between the magic — the transitions, the logistics, the functional necessities — have been designed as entertainment.
Harlan says it directly: “The audience can now relax because they know they are in good hands.” When every transition is smooth, every gap is filled, every moment is intentional, the audience surrenders their skepticism about the show’s quality and settles into trust. They stop evaluating and start experiencing. And that trust, once established, makes everything that follows land harder.
The Klagenfurt silence taught me that dead time is not neutral. It is a negative force that actively undermines energy and trust. Music fills those seams. It turns logistical necessities into production moments.
Twenty seconds of silence while a volunteer walks to the stage. Twenty seconds of music while a volunteer walks to the stage. Same volunteer, same distance, same audience. Two completely different experiences.
Fill the silence. Your show cannot afford not to.