These magicians just designed a new magic trick for people who are blind

Pulling a rabbit from a top hat. Teleporting from one cage to another. Finding a coin behind a five-year-old’s ear. Magic has long inspired a sense of awe and wonder, but one portion of the population has been left out of the fun: people who are blind.

Think about it. The “oooh” when the bunny appears from the hat. The gasp when someone you thought was caged on one side of the stage suddenly appears inside another cage on the other side. The only reason these tricks work is because they fool your eyes into seeing something that, just seconds ago, seemed impossible. For a person who is blind to appreciate any of these tricks, magicians would have to completely reinvent them. And now, someone has.

In November, dozens of magicians from around the world gathered in Las Vegas for a Science of Magic Association conference. There, members of the MAGIC Lab (which stands for Mind Attention & General Illusory Cognition)—a research group from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in the U.K.—announced the winners of a competition called the Auditory Magic Challenge.

Just a few months prior, the MAGIC Lab had sent a call for magic tricks that don’t rely on sight, touch, smell, or taste, but instead evoke wonder purely through sound. No verbal cues. No mentalism tricks. A total of 11 magicians from Europe, India, Japan, and the U.S. submitted tricks, but only one stood out for its surprising auditory illusion.

In this trick, which can be best described as an auditory teleportation, the magician appears to magically move from one corner of the room to another, using nothing but sound to mislead the audience. Three magicians submitted similar tricks; so the jury, which was comprised of magicians, academics, and people who are blind, decided to award all three. There are no plans to perform the magic tricks in front of an audience for now, but the competition proves that it’s possible to create an inclusive magic experience that everyone can enjoy.

The anatomy of a magic trick

Those who have seen Christopher Nolan’s 2006 movie, The Prestige—where Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star as rival stage magicians in Edwardian London—might have learned that every magic trick consists of three parts: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. (These terms are fictional practices of stage illusions, likely Nolan’s invention and not used by real-life magicians, but they are helpful to understand the structure of a magic trick.) For example, the magician first displays something ordinary, like a dove or a deck of cards. Second, they make that object do something extraordinary: the dove disappears. Third, they do the unthinkable: the dove reappears.

This structure is foundational to a successful magic trick, but it doesn’t have to involve visual cues. “I think of magic as a conflict in beliefs between things you believe to be possible and the things you believe you’ve experienced,” says Gustav Kuhn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth and director of the MAGIC Lab, which studies human behavior and cognition through the lens of magic. “Vision is important in terms of establishing what you believe to be true, but it doesn’t have to be the case.”

Kuhn was a magician before he was an academic. “My life was just about magic, I bored my parents to bed,” he told me on a recent video call after the Vegas conference. Kuhn, a founding member and current president of the Science of Magic Association, went on to publish a whopping 37 papers on the science of magic in about 20 years. It’s a considerable figure in and of itself, but especially since the total number of papers ever to be published on the subject amounts to about 170.

In his two decades of research, Kuhn says he found no magic tricks that rely on auditory clues. “In principle, magic does not rely on vision, but it’s incredibly difficult to produce a magic trick that relies on auditory perception alone,” he says. “Auditory illusions exist, but they’ve been manipulated into a trick, which is really exciting.”

The cone of confusion

The winning trick draws on a psychological auditory phenomenon known as the “cone of confusion,” whereby a person can’t determine the exact location of the sound they are hearing. If you have found yourself at the wheel, nervously searching for that wailing ambulance siren so you can figure out whether to pull over or not, then you’ve experienced the cone of confusion.

But that alone is not a magic trick. Auditory illusions, such as the Shepard tone, or this very unsettling “Virtual Barber Shop” illusion, don’t count. In order for an illusion to count as a magic trick, magicians have to create what Kuhn calls “the illusion of impossibility.” It can’t be! is what the audience needs to feel for a mere auditory illusion to graduate to a magic trick.

Ed Brims, who performed one of the winning magic tricks, turned the cone of confusion into a magic trick by simulating an auditory teleportation for his 10-year-old son, Felix, who sat in the middle of a room, wearing a blindfold. At first, Brims circles Felix while clinking a spoon to a glass bottle. Felix is asked to point to where the sound is coming from. Then Brims goes quiet and circles Felix again, clinking the bottle while treading lightly on a carpeted floor. He clinks the bottle once when he’s behind Felix, and Felix points backwards. He clinks again when he’s in front, and Felix continues pointing backwards. Brims then reveals his true position by uttering a “fwoomph” that gives his son the illusion that his father had just teleported from behind him.

The “fwoomph” sound is crucial, Brims tells me, because it ensures that the magic trick remains inclusive until the end. In the video, Felix can be seen removing his blindfold to ensure his father is indeed where he said he was, but the “fwoomph” sound, which is different than the clinking, ensures that people who are blind could understand the reveal without having to rely on sight.

Brims is well attuned to the needs of people with low vision. Several years ago, prior to his job as a software engineer for Bloomberg, in London, he worked at Google, experimenting with ways to turn bar charts into music and helping to make “reading” charts a lot more engaging than listening to a voice relaying the numbers.

He says that Brazilian magician Antonio Bourgeois introduced him to the “cone of confusion” phenomenon at a magic convention in 2022. At the time, Brims didn’t know how to turn it into a magic trick, but when he heard about this competition, he started playing with the idea and landed on the auditory teleportation trick.

The future of magic

The trick is an exciting development, but it comes with a few challenges. For one, it is likely that this particular trick can be performed only once, at which point the brain might learn what to expect and refuse to be fooled twice. (Brims says Felix, initially, had no idea what to expect.) The trick may not be completely reliable as is, either. When Kuhn tried recreating Brims’s trick in his MAGIC Lab, he had to adapt it by bringing in a second person because his students could clearly hear him walking around the first time. Still, it worked. “I didn’t think it would be surprising, and I was surprised by how surprised they were,” says Kuhn.

Technically speaking, Brims and the two other magicians who submitted similar tricks—Kent Cummins from the U.S., and Clément Le Roux from France—also broke a few rules by using a fair amount of language to build the storyline and set the scene (a luxury that the judges had strictly prohibited). I asked Kuhn about the necessity for such draconian measures, and he responded the only way a magician would: He picked up a little rubber ducky he (naturally) had lying around on his desk, bounced it around between his hands once, twice, then poof! The rubber ducky was gone without Kuhn having so much as opened his mouth.

Still, Kuhn acknowledged that his team went too far with the constraints, so they are planning a second competition that will broaden the scope a bit and invite magicians to come up with tricks that can involve any senses other than sight—and maybe also a bit of language.