There is a moment in a film that has stayed with me for years. I cannot remember the film, which tells you something about how sound works on the subconscious. What I remember is this: a character walks through a forest at night, and the soundtrack is nothing but their footsteps on twigs. No music. No dialogue. Just the snap and crunch of dry wood underfoot, the occasional scrape of a branch, and somewhere in the distance, the low call of an owl.
I was terrified. Not because of what was on screen — nothing had happened yet — but because of what I was hearing. The sound told me to be afraid before my conscious mind had any reason to be. The sound was doing the storytelling.
I thought about that moment for a long time before I realized it had anything to do with magic.
The Missing Element
When I first encountered the Five-Pointed Star framework — setting, sound, light, props, story — in Cara Hamilton’s writing on storytelling for magicians, sound was the element that puzzled me most. Setting, I could understand. Light, obviously. Props, of course. Story, that is the whole point. But sound?
I associated sound in magic with two things: having a working microphone, and maybe playing a piece of music during a manipulation act. Those were the two categories. Functional amplification and optional background music. The idea that sound could be a narrative tool — that it could tell a story, set a mood, create a world — was something I associated with film and theater, not with a consultant doing mentalism at a corporate dinner in Salzburg.
I was wrong, and the process of discovering how wrong I was changed the way I think about performance design.
What the Audience Hears Before You Speak
Here is an experiment I ran, almost accidentally. At two corporate events about three weeks apart, I performed the same closing piece for similar audiences in similar rooms. At the first event, I walked on in the standard way — the emcee introduced me, the audience applauded politely, I walked to my position, and I began speaking. The room was in its default state: air conditioning hum, residual chatter dying down, the clatter of dishes being cleared in the back.
At the second event, the tech team was more cooperative than usual, and I asked if they could play a short piece of ambient music through the room speakers for about twenty seconds before my introduction. Nothing dramatic — a low, atmospheric piece with some depth to it, fading in gently as the emcee wrapped up and fading out as I began to speak.
Same room type. Same audience demographic. Same material. The difference in the quality of attention was staggering.
At the first event, the audience’s attention arrived in pieces. Some people turned forward right away. Others took ten or fifteen seconds to disengage from their conversations. A few never fully arrived — they watched with partial attention, still half-connected to the person next to them. The room felt scattered for the first minute or so before it coalesced into something like focused attention.
At the second event, the ambient music did something I had not expected. It created a collective transition. When the music faded in, the chatter faded out. Not because anyone was told to be quiet, but because the sonic environment shifted, and the audience shifted with it. By the time I began speaking, the room was already in a different state. They had been moved, sonically, from “dinner event” to “something is about to happen.” The attention was not arriving in pieces. It arrived as a wave.
Twenty seconds of atmospheric sound accomplished what I had been trying to accomplish with my opening thirty seconds of scripted dialogue. The sound did the work of transitioning the audience before I had to.
Silence as Sound Design
The opposite is equally powerful. I learned this the hard way at an event in Vienna where the venue’s sound system had a persistent low hum — barely noticeable during conversation, but clearly audible during quiet moments. I had planned a piece that included a long dramatic pause, a moment of silence where the audience was supposed to sit with the impossibility of what they had just witnessed.
Instead of silence, they sat with a sixty-hertz hum. The hum filled the space that was supposed to be empty. It turned a moment of charged stillness into a moment of mild irritation. I could see people glancing at the speakers, momentarily pulled out of the experience by a sound that had nothing to do with the performance.
After that, I added a line to my advance requirements: “Please ensure the sound system can be muted during my performance when I am not using it.” It sounds obsessive. It is not. It is the recognition that silence — true silence, or as close to it as a room full of people can achieve — is itself a sound design choice. When you plan a pause into your performance, you are planning a moment where the absence of sound does the storytelling. If that absence is contaminated by hum, or air conditioning roar, or kitchen noise bleeding through a partition wall, the moment fails.
Hamilton’s framework includes sound as one of the five elements that support a story, and I have come to believe it might be the most underestimated of the five. Setting, light, and props are visual — we notice them because we are visual creatures. Story is verbal — it is the most obvious narrative element. But sound operates below conscious attention. It shapes the audience’s emotional state without them knowing it is happening.
The Era-Appropriate Recording
One of the ideas that most captured my imagination was the concept of using ambient sound — not music, but environmental sound — to establish the world of a presentation. The idea that you could play, very quietly through the room speakers, the sound of a crackling fire, or distant rain, or the ambient noise of an old building settling, and that this would shift the audience’s sense of where they were.
I have not used this technique extensively — my performing context is mostly corporate, and the opportunities for atmospheric sound design are limited. But I did try it once, at a private event in a smaller venue where I had more control over the environment. I was performing a piece framed around the idea of old traditions, of knowledge passed between generations. During the setup, while I was speaking, the tech operator played a very low recording of crackling fire through the room speakers.
Nobody mentioned the fire sounds afterward. Nobody said “oh, I liked the crackling sound.” It was below the threshold of conscious attention for most people. But the quality of the listening was different. The room felt warmer. The audience was leaning in. The story I was telling felt, somehow, more real.
That is the power of sound design in performance. It does not announce itself. It does not ask for attention. It works on the same level as those footsteps on twigs in the film I cannot remember — below the surface, shaping the emotional state of the listener without their knowledge or consent.
Music Selection as Narrative Choice
I want to distinguish between ambient sound design and music selection, because they are related but different tools.
Music is a more direct form of emotional manipulation. The right piece of music can elevate a performance from good to transcendent. The wrong piece can make a serious moment feel like a shopping mall demonstration. I have made both errors.
The principle I have settled on is this: music should be chosen for what it communicates, not for what it sounds like to you in isolation. A piece of music that moves you deeply when you listen to it on headphones may communicate something entirely different when played in a room full of people watching you perform. The context changes the meaning.
I listen to potential performance music in settings as close to the actual performance context as I can manage. In a room with ambient noise. At the volume level I would actually use. While imagining the audience in front of me. This eliminates a surprising number of tracks that sound perfect in isolation but feel wrong in context. A dramatic orchestral piece that gives you chills at home can feel overwrought and self-important in a corporate ballroom. A simple piano melody that seems too plain on headphones can feel exactly right when it is supporting a moment rather than competing with it.
The Volume Curve
One technical detail that made a disproportionate difference: the volume curve. Not just how loud the music is, but how its volume changes over the course of a piece.
The default approach — and the one I used for too long — is to set a volume level and leave it. Music at a constant volume becomes auditory wallpaper within about thirty seconds. The audience stops hearing it. It becomes background, and background is not doing narrative work.
A simple volume curve changes this. Music that fades in gently, rises slightly during moments of building tension, drops to near-silence during reveals, and swells again for a climactic moment — this curve maps the music to the emotional arc of the performance. The audience may not consciously hear the volume changes, but they feel them. The music is not wallpaper anymore. It is a narrator.
I work with the venue’s sound technician on this whenever possible. A five-minute conversation during sound check — “here’s where it should come in, here’s where it should be quietest, here’s where it should peak” — gives the technician everything they need. Most of them are grateful for clear direction. They are used to performers who either micromanage every decibel or give no guidance at all.
What the Room Sounds Like to the Audience
There is one more dimension of sound design that took me too long to appreciate: the acoustics of the room itself. Not the sound system — the room.
A room with hard surfaces and high ceilings creates reverberation. Words blur. Punchlines lose their edges. Pauses fill with echo. A room with low ceilings and soft surfaces absorbs sound. Words arrive dry and intimate. Pauses are truly silent.
I cannot change a room’s acoustics. But I can adjust my performance to the room. In a reverberant space, I slow down and articulate more carefully, because the room is going to smear my words. I keep my scripted language simpler, because complex sentences lose their structure in the echo. I shorten my pauses slightly, because a long pause in a reverberant room does not feel like silence — it feels like I have lost my place.
In a dead, absorbent room, I can speak faster and trust that every word arrives intact. I can use longer pauses, because the silence is genuinely silent. I can lower my voice for intimate moments, because the room is not going to scatter the sound.
These adjustments are invisible to the audience. But they are the difference between a performance that sounds clear and intentional and one that sounds muddy and uncertain.
Designing the Sonic World
The shift in my thinking — from “do I have a microphone” to “what is the sonic world of this performance” — happened gradually. It is still happening. I am not a sound designer and I do not pretend to be one. But I now think about sound as a narrative element in every performance I design.
What does the audience hear before I appear? What do they hear during the quietest moments? What do they hear at the climax? What do they hear when it is over?
These questions used to seem irrelevant to me. They were questions for filmmakers, for theater directors, for people with budgets and technical crews. But they apply just as powerfully to a person standing in front of fifty people at a corporate dinner, telling a story and making the impossible seem real for a few minutes.
The footsteps on twigs taught me that. Sound tells the story before the story begins, underneath the story while it unfolds, and after the story ends. You can let that happen by accident, or you can design it with intention.
I choose intention now. And the performances are better for it — not because the audience notices the sound design, but precisely because they do not.