Halfway through a keynote at a corporate event in Graz, someone in the back of the room dropped a metal water bottle. It hit the marble floor with a sharp, ringing crack that echoed off the high ceiling. Every single person in the room — every single one — turned their head toward the sound. Including me. Including the event organizer who had been quietly checking her phone behind a pillar. Including the server who had been carrying a tray of glasses and nearly dropped them because she, too, turned toward the noise.
The whole room snapped to attention in the same direction, involuntarily, simultaneously, for the same reason. Nobody chose to look. Nobody made a conscious decision. Their heads simply turned.
The moment lasted about two seconds before everyone returned their attention to me and the presentation continued. But those two seconds contained a lesson about attention that I had been reading about for months without fully absorbing. Sound is not a suggestion. It is a command. And the human nervous system obeys it before the conscious mind even knows what happened.
The Fifth Tool
When I first encountered Darwin Ortiz’s eight tools of attention control in Strong Magic, I read through them methodically, the way a consultant reads a framework — checking each one against my experience, looking for patterns, trying to rank them by importance. Eye contact: yes, obviously. Body language: makes sense. Patter: directing with words. Movement: the reflex to follow motion. Sound.
I paused at sound.
Not because I did not understand it. I understood it immediately. We all understand it. A loud noise turns your head. A sudden sound captures attention. This is so basic, so obvious, that I almost skipped past it. But Ortiz frames it differently than you might expect. He does not just say sound is useful. He says it is involuntary. He puts it in the same category as movement — mechanisms that are beyond people’s conscious control. The audience, he writes, has no choice but to look.
No choice. That is a striking claim in a field where so much of what we do involves hoping the audience will cooperate. Hoping they will look where we want them to look. Hoping they will pay attention to the right things at the right time. Sound does not require hope. Sound bypasses the decision entirely.
Why Sound Works When Nothing Else Does
The reason sound is so powerful as an attention tool goes back to our evolutionary wiring. Long before human beings developed language, long before we had complex social cognition or the ability to follow subtle gestural cues, we had ears that functioned as an early warning system. A snapping twig in the darkness. A growl from behind a rock. The splash of something entering the water nearby. These sounds demanded immediate attention not because our ancestors chose to investigate, but because the ones who did not investigate were the ones who got eaten.
That reflex — the involuntary orientation toward sudden or unexpected sound — is still running in our nervous system. It is what psychologists call the orienting response, and it is fast, automatic, and extremely difficult to override. You can decide not to look at something. You can decide to ignore someone’s gesture. You can choose not to follow someone’s gaze. But when a sharp sound cuts through the ambient noise, your head turns before you have made any decision at all.
Research from the MAGIC-lab at Goldsmiths University has documented how attentional misdirection works through multiple sensory channels. Their taxonomy of misdirection includes attentional mechanisms that control where spectators look and when they pay attention. Sound is one of the most reliable of these mechanisms precisely because it does not require the spectator’s cooperation.
This is what makes it fundamentally different from eye contact or patter. Those tools work through social convention. We look where someone else is looking because we have learned to do so. We look at what someone is describing because language directs our mental attention. These are powerful tools, but they require the audience to be socially engaged with you. If someone is not watching you, your eye contact does nothing. If someone is not listening to you, your patter cannot direct them.
Sound, however, reaches the person who is not watching. It reaches the person who is checking their phone. It reaches the person in the back row whose mind has wandered to their parking meter. It reaches everyone in the room simultaneously, regardless of whether they were previously paying attention to you or not.
The Snap, the Tap, the Whistle
Once I understood this, I started noticing sound-based attention control everywhere. Not just in magic, but in everyday performance contexts. The way a keynote speaker claps their hands together before making a key point. The way a teacher taps a desk. The way a conductor raises and drops a baton — the baton itself is silent, but the sharp attack of the orchestra’s first note functions as an attention command to the audience.
In magic, the most common sound-based attention tool is something so small you might not even notice it: the snap of the fingers. Watch almost any magician perform a transformation or a vanish, and you will hear a snap at the moment of the effect. It seems like a theatrical gesture — the snap is the “magic moment,” the punctuation of the impossible event. And it is that. But it is also doing something more mechanical: it is capturing attention at the exact moment the performer wants the audience to look at a specific location.
The snap says: here. Now. This spot. And the audience’s orienting response pulls their attention exactly where the performer wants it, at exactly the right moment, without the performer having to say a word.
I started experimenting with this in my own performances. Not just the snap — though I use that too — but the strategic deployment of sound as a control mechanism. A sharp tap on the table before I reveal a prediction. The deliberate click of a pen. The rustle of an envelope being opened. Each of these sounds creates a micro-moment of involuntary attention. The audience cannot help but focus on the source of the sound.
Sound as Misdirection
Here is where it gets interesting. If sound captures attention involuntarily, then sound can also function as misdirection. Not by directing attention toward the important thing, but by directing attention away from it.
Think about it. If I need the audience to not look at my left hand for half a second, I could try to use eye contact — looking at my right hand, hoping they follow my gaze. I could try patter — saying something about the card in my right hand. Both of these might work. But they depend on the audience already being engaged with me and following social cues.
Or I could create a sound with my right hand. A tap. A snap. A sharp contact between a card and the table. The sound would pull their attention to my right hand reflexively, without requiring any prior engagement, without requiring them to be following my gaze or listening to my words. For that half-second, their attention is captured by the sound, and my left hand is invisible — not because it is hidden, but because their orienting response has been hijacked.
This is the same principle that makes the dropped water bottle in Graz so instructive. Nobody in that room chose to look at the water bottle. Their nervous systems simply responded to the sound. If a random accident can capture the attention of an entire room, then a deliberately placed sound can capture attention with even more precision.
The Volume Curve
Sound as attention control is not just about sudden noises. It is also about the deliberate manipulation of volume over time.
I learned this through my keynote work before I ever applied it to magic. When you speak at the same volume for an extended period, the audience habituates. Your voice becomes background. But when you suddenly drop your volume — when you shift from a normal speaking voice to something barely above a whisper — something remarkable happens. The room gets quieter. People lean forward. Attention sharpens.
This is counterintuitive. You would think that getting louder would capture more attention. And it does, briefly, through the orienting response. A sudden increase in volume startles people into attention. But a sudden decrease in volume does something different: it creates a gap. The audience has been receiving information at a certain volume, and when that volume drops, they have to work harder to receive it. That effort translates into focused attention.
The whisper is one of the most underrated tools in a performer’s arsenal. When I lean toward a spectator and lower my voice during a mentalism piece, the entire room goes quiet. Not because I asked for quiet. Not because the content is inherently more interesting. But because the drop in volume triggers a collective response: we need to pay closer attention to hear what is being said.
Combine this with a microphone and the effect multiplies. A handheld mic allows you to create intimate, whispered moments that are still audible to the entire room. The audience hears the whisper, recognizes it as a whisper, and responds as if they are overhearing something private. Their attention locks in because the sound itself signals significance.
The Absence of Sound
The most powerful sound-based attention tool might be the one that involves no sound at all: the pause.
A pause after a loud sequence is experienced as sudden silence, and sudden silence is itself a form of auditory contrast. It triggers the same orienting response as a sudden noise, but through the opposite mechanism. The nervous system was processing sound, and now it is not. That change — that absence where presence was expected — demands attention.
I use pauses constantly now. Before a reveal, I stop talking. I stop moving. I let the room settle into silence. And in that silence, attention concentrates. Every person in the room becomes aware that something is about to happen, because the absence of sound signals that the next sound will be significant.
This is timing. And timing, at its core, is the manipulation of sound and silence to control when the audience pays attention and how much attention they pay.
Making Sound Deliberate
The shift in my practice was not learning that sound controls attention — I already knew that intuitively. The shift was making it deliberate. Treating sound not as an accidental byproduct of my actions but as a designed element of my performance.
Every contact between my hand and the table is now intentional. Every time I set down a prop, I consider whether the sound it makes will attract attention — and whether I want attention attracted at that moment. Every time I speak, I consider the volume curve: where am I loud, where am I soft, where do I pause, where does the silence do the work.
This extends to the sounds I do not make. The soft placement of a prop when I do not want the audience to notice it. The smooth, silent handling of cards when attention should be elsewhere. Eliminating unwanted sound is just as important as creating wanted sound, because every sound is an attention signal whether I intend it or not.
The water bottle in Graz was an accident. But it taught me something that no amount of reading could have made visceral: the audience had no choice but to look. They could not resist. They could not override it. The sound commanded their attention, and their attention obeyed.
Every performance I give now, I use that knowledge on purpose. Not through accidents, but through design. Sound is not decoration. Sound is not atmosphere. Sound is a direct line to the audience’s involuntary attention system, and when you use it deliberately, you are working with the most ancient and reliable mechanism in the human perceptual toolkit.
They have no choice but to look.
The only question is whether you are the one deciding when and where.