One Man's Testing: Voice Recognition

I reached a milestone recently that I wanted to tell you about.

It’s regarding phone magic and voice recognition inputs.

I had avoided voice recognition inputs for a long time. I was not alone in this. I think it was generally considered a bad idea. “People know about voice recognition,” people would say. That’s right, they do, I would think.

But as a test, a couple of years ago, I decided to use that input from time to time. I started using it with Earworm, I believe. At that point I told myself, “I’m going to use this until someone busts me on it.”

While I encourage the people I perform for to give themselves over to the experience of the trick. I don’t ask them to turn their brain off. And I frequently get them asking, “Hmm… is that a normal deck? Can I look at that coin? Is that a special Rubik’s cube or something?” Not all in one sentence like that (that would be a weird trick). But in general, I want people to poke and prod at how it might be done. It helps me make the trick stronger. And it makes it more baffling to them if I can prove wrong any assumptions they might have.

So I figured I would be called out on using voice recognition relatively quickly.

And yet, yesterday I had my 100th performance using that input without someone mentioning it. (Not just with Earworm, but also some of David Jonathan’s shortcuts, the new DFBX and more.)

So if you’ve been avoiding it… maybe you don’t need to? 🤷‍♂️

Now, you may want to avoid it because it can fail. Because it can “mishear” you. Which has happened to me five times in those 100 performances. Although less lately. Either it’s gotten better at discerning words or I’ve gotten better at enunciating how it wants me to, or both.

Why doesn’t it get called out? I have a couple of theories.

1. While people understand your iPhone can hear you, and you can tell it something to do, they’re more accustomed to you saying, “Hey Siri” or something like that. Most people who aren’t super-users of their phone don’t really think of setting key phrases to listen for, and then the phone doing something in the background once it hears those.

2. Talking is so essential to performing magic that it doesn’t really raise suspicion. I wrote long ago that suspicion is raised when you do something that feels unnecessary. Just talking doesn’t immediately trip that suspicion.

Now, this was “testing” that was done by me, for people I know. I would differentiate these results from the kind of results we get with wide-scale focus-group testing. I don’t have the confidence that these results are necessarily universal. But you may want to give it a shot if you’ve been avoiding using voice-recognition as an input.

And if you do get caught, play stupid. “Huh? What? You think when I said the name of the song you were thinking of the phone was listening and brought up that song on youtube? Wait… but I would have to ask Siri to do that, right? No? What do you mean? I’m confused. This sounds cool. Can you show me on your phone what you’re talking about?”

Turn it around and make them try to educate your dumbass.

Mail: The Power of Frustrating Logic

I got a bit of a confused email yesterday, but it introduces a point that I want to cover. It’s in regard to the idea I posted on Monday of adding your own notes to Chris Rawlin’s effect Declassified, in order to have a reasonable justification why you won’t just hand over the document at the end of the effect for them to flip through.

The email said:

Rare that I think an idea you come up with is not so good,  but yikes, your justification for the partial examination of the document in Declassified (I don't have it) is pretty lame.

No, no one is ever going to accept that excuse. It will just make them more curious about the document than ever.

"You can then tell them you’ll send them a pdf of the full document if they want to examine the contents more closely. "

No. Would you say, "I can't let you examine this pack of cards, but come by next week and I'll show you one just like it."

Only possible way I could begin to accept that is in a highly structured narrative presentation for one person--you go to the painting of Whistler's Mother's above your bed, move it aside and reveal a wall safe. You crack the safe open and take out the document from there. Maybe, just maybe, then I'll accept the excuse of personal notes too explosive to read, but in a casual setting, no way.

Gotta be a switch, an envelope or folder or something, somehow. They are going to want to look and not be satisfied until they do. —JS

I don’t think anyone else quite misinterpreted the post in this way (I heard from a number of people who own the trick and liked the idea), but just in case, let me clarify things before moving on:

First, writing the notes on the document is not intended to allay suspicion on the document. It's intended to give a story-based rationale for why they can't get a close look at your personal copy of the document. You still give them a look through the doc, showing all the pages as different. That's really all they want to see in that moment. They want to confirm there was lots of different pictures to look at. (If they're thinking "svengali document" you've already lost them.)

Second, the offer to send them a pdf of the document is to reinforce the reality of the document as something that exists in the real world. Again, not to allay their suspicion on my copy of the document. That's why I said it would allow them to examine the contents of the document more closely. So the trick deck analogy is irrelevant. (I've re-written that sentence to remove the word "examine" so people don't misread it similarly.)

Third, putting the document in a safe isn't congruent with my story where I'm someone with an interest in magic, I got a copy of this document, and I've been making notes on how I can use these techniques for mind-reading purposes. I guess if you want to convince people you have state-secrets that they can't look at, that would make sense. But I'm going for something more based in reality.

Think of it this way… If I do a trick involving a photo on my camera roll, I don’t give them free rein to go through my photos. If I do a trick with my Notes App, I don't let them freely look through all my notes. That’s understandable, yes?

So the goal is to turn this from just a print-out of a document to a personal item. One that I’m happy to flip through and show to them. But not something they can have unfettered access to.

I think most people got that, but I wanted to clarify.

Sure, you could put the document in an envelope or folder and switch it, but that doesn’t make the suspicion go away. It just focuses the suspicion on the moment where you’re putting the document in an envelope or folder before giving it to them to examine. Which is similar to doing the shuttle pass before handing something out to be examined.

In this case, I’m not trying to eliminate their suspicion. I’m trying to put a little poison pill into it.

And we do this with a story and a motivation that makes sense.

The thing about saying, “I’ve been keeping some personal notes on this document, so I don’t want to let you look at everything,” is that it’s FRUSTRATINGLY LOGICAL to people watching.

This is the power of a logical story. It’s the power of a reasonable motivation.

The problem so often in magic is that our actions seem unmotivated and unreasonable. “I made these two rubber bands link. But I’m not going to do the most obvious thing and let you look at them in their linked condition. Instead, I’ll ‘magically unlink’ them and then hand them to you to look at.” Oh, okay, Mr. Magician, that makes sense.

But a cohesive story can frustrate an audience by never letting their suspicion coalesce 100%.

This doesn’t mean they’re not suspicious. It just means that they don’t have the comfort of knowing they’re right 100%, because there’s a logical explanation for why they might not be. There’s always that niggling doubt.

If spectators have a little suspicion about something, and there’s no story/motivation in place to counteract the suspicion, then the suspicion takes over completely.

But if they have a lot of suspicion about something, but there’s a logical motivation in place to combat that suspicion, then you at least have a stalemate.

My friend used to do a visual coin bend with a gimmicked coin and a switch at the end. There was always at least a little suspicion at the end on the switch, and that little suspicion ended up killing the effect. “He did something with the coin at the end,” was the feeling.

So then he started performing it this way. He would concentrate on the coin and say it was getting hot. It would begin to bend. “Fuck,” he’d say, “this hurts.” The coin would continue to bend and he’d grimace his way through it. Eventually, he’d say, “Goddammit,” and start shaking his hand in pain and the coin would go flying. After a few seconds, he would go to retrieve the coin from under the couch or behind a chair or wherever he “accidentally” tossed it, and would pull out a normal, examinable, bent coin in the process. “Don’t touch it yet, it’s still hot,” he’d say, and blow on the coin until it had (supposedly) cooled enough that he was comfortable letting them look at it.

Obviously, reaching under a couch allows for much more duplicitousness than just taking the coin from one hand to the other. But because the motivation made sense (“the coin got so hot I dropped it”) they couldn’t dismiss that completely as being part of the deception. It just makes too much sense. It’s frustratingly logical.

Yes, in a perfect world you would visually bend the coin and drop it directly in their hand to look at. In a perfect world you would have them look at any picture in a document, read their mind, and slide the document directly to them for a full examination. But in the real world (the imperfect world), one of the ways to prevent them from latching onto some Easy Answer regarding what happened is to give them a frustratingly logical alternative that they just can’t quite dismiss completely.

This Doesn't Work Like You Think it Does: Vanishes

If you have a vanish of a small object that doesn’t end like this…

then you don’t really have a vanish.

So if you vanish a card and it looks like this…

Or you vanish a coin and it ends like this…

Then what you have is a cute, possibly impressive, bit of finger gymnastics that allow you to hide something that’s still in your hand. But you haven’t convinced anyone the object is anywhere but in your hands.

Obviously in magic we have to make concessions because we’re not performing genuine miracles. But showing your hands empty is kind of the definition of vanishing something. So you can’t make concessions on that part of it. It’s the first and only thing you would do to show something has vanished. 

And there’s just no reasonable justification not to do it.

You can argue that a Book Test is a dumb way to demonstrate mind reading, because why would they need to look at a word in a book? That makes some sense, but I can come up with a reasonable justification for that with the story of the effect.

I can’t come up with a reasonable justification for why I can vanish something, just so long as my fingers are tight together or my hand is in some awkward position. Sure, I could feign a crippling case of arthritis, and live that way for years to really convince people. Then when I vanish the coin and my fingers are kinked in some odd manner, people will say, “Poor guy. The power to vanish coins. But not heal his arthritis.” But that seems like a long way to go.

You might say, “I don’t care. Look, they know they’re magic tricks. So it doesn’t have to be 100% convincing.” I know a lot of performers take that position. And I get that.

Personally, I want them to know it’s a trick, but I still strive to give them no obvious explanations to latch onto.

Of course, that means abandoning a lot of “vanishes” where the object is still hidden in my hand. I’m fine with that. There aren’t a lot of vanishes that end totally clean. But there are enough. I’m always looking for more though. So if you know of any (that I’m unlikely to have heard of), email me and let me know about them.

If You Have...

If you have Declassified by Chris Rawlins…

Declassifed, by Chris Rawlins, is sort of an image duplication where your friend looks at a picture in a manuscript and you’re able to draw what they looked at with no questions.

What makes this particularly good is that it’s based on this legitimate document about the testing of Uri Geller. (I mean the document is “legitimate” in the sense that it’s a real thing. I’m sure whatever is written up in it is nonsense.) So it’s a drawing duplication/book test sort of hybrid that makes sense given the subject matter.

When I got my copy, I liked it a lot, but I didn’t think it was something I’d be likely to use. In casual situations it’s difficult to bring out some interesting object and then just hope that people aren’t too interested to look closely at it (as this isn’t something that can be examined).

But I had an idea that allows this to be used in close-up, casual performances.

You bring out the document and explain what it is, flipping through it, showing the different pages and images throughout. You have your friend look at an image, and then you read their mind or predict it or whatever.

At this point, the manuscript is at peak interest for the other person. If they’re going to want to look at it closely, this is the point where they will.

“Can I look at that?” they ask.

“Sure,” you go to hand them the document. “Actually… what is it you want to see? I have a bunch of my personal notes in here. I’d rather you not see them because I might want to use them for something in the future. Is there something in particular you wanted to see?”

You now flip through the document again, showing them the pages, reinforcing the idea they could have looked at dozens of images.

The idea being that you’ll let them get a brief glimpse at the document, but you don’t want to let them look through it fully because you’ve made some “notes” in there that aren’t meant for other people to see.

Of course, you’ll want to add some actual notes to the document to go along with this story.

While, in an ideal situation you would be able to just had them the document, I think this justification makes perfect sense within the storyline of the effect. You got a copy of this document so you could learn about these techniques. You made some notes in the document as you studied it. You don’t necessarily want those notes to be seen by someone else.

You can then tell them you’ll send them a pdf of the full document if they want to read through the contents more closely.

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If you have Superimpose by Craig Petty…

I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I had any thoughts on how to present this trick. Specifically, how to clarify or contextualize the ending, where the selected cards “superimpose” themselves onto the aces.

I think the best idea is to play it off as some kind of mistake in the execution of the magic. You intended to transport the cards a second time, but you F’d up while reconstituting the selections between the aces and you got everything jumbled together.

Like when Jeff Goldblum’s DNA got mixed up with that fly in The Fly.

Craig may suggest this angle in the instructions, I don’t know. (Not the fly angle, but the angle of presenting it as something going wrong.)

Often, when you don’t have a good rationale for why something happens or why you would want something to happen, presenting it as a magical mistake is a good way to keep the impossibility and not have to deal with the incoherence of the premise.

Think of the classic (?) Milk to Lightbulb effect. If your presentation is just, “I can make milk go to a lightbulb,” it sounds like you went to the Mad Libs School of Random Impossibilities. But if you make milk disappear and say you’ll make it reappear in a glass across the room, there is a logic to that premise. And if—mistakenly—the milk ends up filling a lightbulb in a lamp between you and the target glass, you now have a “mistake” that fully contextualizes the effect.

The premise doesn’t make sense if it’s intentional, but if it’s a mistake, it doesn’t have to make sense, and it can still be magical.

Don’t overuse this idea. You want to leave the possibility that this was really a mistake. And if you constantly use that approach, no one will believe it.

The 70/30 Rule - Tweaking the 100-Trick Repertoire

Having a 100-Trick Repertoire is something I’ve written about for almost a decade now. First in my book, The Amateur at the Kitchen Table, and since then on this blog from time to time.

The make-up of my 100-Trick Repertoire and how I go about maintaining it is constantly changing. I don’t make note of every last tweak here on the site, just because it’s really not that necessary. How you go about building, rehearsing, and managing a similarly large repertoire is going to come down to what works for you personally.

But I have made a recent tweak I wanted to pass along to you. Especially if you’ve found the concept of a 100-Trick Repertoire to be overwhelming.

I now max out at about 30 tricks in my repertoire that have Advanced Methodology.

What do I mean by Advanced Methodology? I mean tricks where the methodology is unique to that trick. Or the thought required to perform it is unique to that trick. Or the choreography of sleights is unique to that trick.

For example, if I have a trick where the method is a simple business card peek, that’s not an Advanced Method. That’s something I’ve been doing in one form or another for decades. I’m completely confident with it. I can do it without thinking.

The mental real-estate required to keep that trick in my repertoire is almost none.

For those who get my monthly newsletter where I talk about the tricks I’ve been performing recently, I recently wrote about A.B. See by Spidey as well as the Penrose Pendant by Josh Prace.

A.B. See is a trick that requires some thought for me to perform. I need to keep the method fresh in my mind. It has an Advanced Method. Even if it’s a simple trick to execute.

On the other hand. If I was in a persistent vegetative state for 20 years and someone gave me an experimental drug that woke me up for 5 minutes, I could perform Penrose Pendant before even wiping the coma-crust from my eyes. It’s got a Simple Method.

Reswindled, by Caleb Wiles, is a modern-classic of card magic construction.

None of the moves used are particularly difficult. But it’s definitely an Advanced Method. Remembering all the steps is something that requires a bit of thought.

In contrast, Be Honest, What Is It (2 Card Monte), is something I’ve done for 20 years or more. With a half-second of thought, I’m fully ready to start performing that trick. There’s a few different moves involved, which could be considered intermediate level moves. But they’re moves I’m completely comfortable with. So to me this is a trick with a Simple Method.

This Advanced/Simple categorization isn’t inherent in the trick. It’s a matter of the performer’s comfort level with the method used.

It’s really a matter of how much concentration and focus the trick requires for you.

Thus, you could have a self-working trick that has an Advanced Method because of the steps you need to remember to accomplish the trick.

And you could have an incredibly sleight-heavy trick that is—for you—a Simple Method because it’s very easy for you to pull off.

As I said, in my 100-Trick Repertoire, I’m shooting for no more than 30 tricks with “Advanced Methods.”

This is part of the Carefree Magic philosophy.

100 tricks is a lot. I want to have a facility with a lot of tricks without the psychological weight of maintaining a repertoire with a bunch of tricks that are difficult to perform or difficult to remember.

You want to be nimble, and light on your feet with your repertoire. Of course, you also want to keep yourself intellectually stimulated and engaged with the magic, too. That’s why I’m shooting for a 70/30 blend. That’s what appeals to me at this point in time.

I can see myself weighing it even more toward the “simple” in the future. And I wouldn’t argue against someone who wants a 100% Simple repertoire.

For now, the 70/30 split feels good. I can make sure to practice one “Advanced” trick a day, and that hits on all of them each month. The tricks in the 70 don’t generally have to be “practiced” as much. I just have to remind myself of them and run through them in my head.

Ultimately, the goal is not just to know 100 tricks. It’s to have a 100-Trick Repertoire that is composed of very strong, doable material. And this new form of categorization has moved me even closer to that goal.

Types of Magic

Chris C. informed me of this interesting bit of taxonomy you can currently find on Google if you search for types of magic tricks. One of them is a little shocking.

That’s a little… unusual… isn’t it?

I mean… calling mentalism a “type of magic trick”? I was well-informed by the members of the “Penny for Your Thoughts” community on the Magic Café that mentalism is not magic. “Odd that you’re discussing it here on the MAGIC Café then,” I always thought.

But I get it. I don’t like to associate with magicians, either. But sometimes you just can’t deny what you are.

“We’re not magicians! We’re so different! Our thumbtips have a little tiny bit of lead on them!” That’s an awfully weak differentiation.

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UPDATE

Hmm… okay. I guess I totally misunderstood why Chris sent me this image.

A lot of people seem to think mentalism isn’t the weird thing on this list. Let me relook.

…

Okay. I’m not getting it.

Levitation is definitely a trick. Transformation is definitely a trick. And Sexual Penetration, when done by a magician, is almost always some kind of trick. I mean… how is a magician going to achieve sexual penetration if not through deception? God knows it won’t be via his personality.

So I see no problem with the list.

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UPDATE #2

Okay, now I’m getting a bunch of people emailing saying I’ve mischaracterized a lot of magician’s sexual penetration. It’s not always based on a trick. I guess this is true. It’s a matter of definition. I don’t consider the number one form of magician’s sexual activity (sliding your dick between the mattress and the box spring and grinding away while looking at your cousin’s cheerleading photo) to be “sexual penetration.”

But yes, I guess if you include that, then not all of their Sexual Penetration is a trick.

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Note: As of 11 am EST on July 10th, that’s still what you get on Google when you search for types of magic tricks. I don’t know how long it will last.

Mail: Googleability

The randomizer took me to "Is He Still Talking About Google-ability? He Is.” and I realized something.

A while ago I was at the movies with two quarters I was going to use on a candy machine when one of the quarters vanished. A magic trick in real life. And what I noticed is that it took a while before I was sure it was gone. I had to search everywhere it could be.

I think this is part of any vanish effect—you have to give the audience time to look (mentally, maybe) everywhere before they’re convinced it’s gone.

But today I realized that this can also apply to people googling tricks. If you do a trick that fools me, I’m not going to be completely fooled until I have looked everywhere for the secret. Googling is just that same impulse. Maybe.—PM

I still get people who will debate this with me. That is, the idea that sometimes a spectator who is fooled will Google the specifics of a trick to try and figure it out. And by “sometimes,” I mean, “more often than not, if they really have no clue.”

When people deny this happens (or deny it happens to them), I usually ask them to consider this thought experiment. Imagine we’re not talking about google and the internet. Imagine we’re talking about a book. Your spectator has a book in their pocket that they’re pretty sure might have the secret to the trick with which you just badly fooled them. You think they’re not going to crack that fucking book open after you leave?

And yes, there are things you can do to hopefully dissuade them from doing so (as written about in the post above and others). But the best course of action is to take steps to make your magic ungoogleable in the first place.