The Tone Hook
/Most of you—at least those of you over the age of 30 or so—have probably heard of the aural sensitivity indicators for latent psychic abilities.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the story goes that Stanford University was trying to study psychic phenomena in the 1970s. And one of the issues when you try and study these things is that if you put out an ad looking for test-subjects who believe they have psychic powers, you end up dealing with a bunch of nut-jobs. So these researchers had to find a way to identify potential subjects without putting out an open call that would inevitably get over-run by whackos.
So how do you identify these people? Well, there were a lot of different methods they used, but the most useful one was where they looked for “psychic aural sensitivity.” In their research they had found that people who expressed various psychic abilities had an abnormal sensitivity to sounds at very specific frequencies. So, for example, people who had a gift for intuiting images would often be able to hear tones at a frequency that most others couldn’t. And if the researchers wanted to gather such people, they’d go to a crowded shopping area or a sports stadium and they’d broadcast that tone over the PA system. Then they would just have to look for the people who were reacting to the noise that 99+% of the people couldn’t hear. And that’s how they would identify potential test-subjects for their experiments.
None of this is remotely true, of course. It’s just the backstory I came up with for this Hook which can be used to transition into any sort of psychic/mentalism effect where the spectator briefly possesses some type of power.
I don’t start with the story above. That’s just the backstory that exists in my head depending how far deep into this I want to go with the person.
Here is what this Hook looks like in action…
I was hanging out with my friend Katy recently. We had just had lunch and afterwards we went to her place to get some work done (we weren’t working on the same project, just in the same room).
At one point, in the middle of the afternoon, I turned to her and asked, “Can you hear this?” As I played something on my phone.
She shook her head and said, “Turn it up.”
“It is up,” I told her. “How about this. Can you hear that?” I said, as I played something else.
She told me again that she can’t and I said, “Hmmm. See… I think I do hear that one, actually. But maybe I’m imagining it.”
“How about this,” I said, holding out the phone again.
“I hear that,” she said.
“Wait… seriously?” I said, sitting up from my slumped position on the couch.
“Yeah. Why?” she asked.
“Hold on. Are you being serious? What do you hear?” I said, somewhat skeptically.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just like a high tone, I guess? Like a beeping sound. A high beep.”
“Holy shit,” I said. And I gave her a very brief explanation of what it was she heard. That explanation is essentially what you read at the beginning of this post, but I didn’t go into all the details. I just said that these were tones used in parapsychology research at Stanford University to identify people who had potential psychic gifts in certain areas.
“You heard the tone that indicates an aptitude for psychic cognition related to numbers.”
“Huh?” she asked.
“Are you good with numbers? Do you have an intuitive sense with numbers?”
“No,” she said. “I’m terrible with numbers. Terrible with math.”
“Hmm… Well, that could mean a few things. Maybe the tone is off—maybe my phone isn’t reproducing it well. Or the research behind the tone isn’t accurate. Or you could be dealing with a temporary condition. Sometimes people have brief bouts of psychic abilities. Like it’s something that comes on and then fades away. Like being congested.
“Here… let’s try something,” I said.
That, generally, is how it would be used.
In this particular instance, I then went into an impromptu version of Larry Becker’s Some Total routine that I use where the spectator gets a brief glimpse of a few different 4-digit numbers and she, inexplicably, is able to instantly give the total of those numbers without any thought.
This trick knocked my friend for a loop. She was speechless.
After letting the moment sit for a little bit, I brought out my phone again and said, “Can you still hear this?” She could no longer hear the tone. “Ah, okay, yeah. I thought that might happen. It was likely just a temporary back-up of mathematical intuition. We probably cleared it out with that demonstration.
That’s how the Hook is used. They hear a special tone that you (apparently) can’t hear yourself. That tone pulls you into a demonstration of whatever “power” is supposedly suggested by their ability to hear the tone.
The best way to get into this is to be very casual at the start. “Can you hear this? How about this?” You’re not even really fully engaged with what you’re doing at this point. You’re just half-heartedly playing the tones without expecting anything. It’s only when your friend says they can hear something that you get excited.
Below you will find five different pages. On the first page, none of the audio files play any sound. On the other pages, one of them will play a high-pitched tone. Just bring up the particular page that’s in line with the trick you want to show the person. For instance, if you wanted to frame a drawing duplication as them drawing something that’s in your mind, then you would bring up the page where they hear the tone that represents an aptitude for psychic powers related to images.
You, of course, just act like you can’t hear the tone yourself.
At some point after they’ve heard the tone and we’ve talked about it, I secretly switch to the page where no tones play on any of the audio files. This allows me to wrap it up nicely at the end with the talk about how the power is frequently only temporary. I always like to clean things up at the end of a routine that gives the spectator “powers.” If I say, “You have the ability to separate red cards from black cards” and you go home and you can’t do it, then you can quickly dismiss it as a trick. But if I explain some reason why you temporarily have the ability to separate red and black cards, then you wouldn’t expect to be able to do it when you got home. And so we keep alive a sliver of doubt that just maybe you really did do it in that moment.
Okay, here are the pages:
No Audible Tones
Psychic Ability for Numbers
Psychic Ability for Words
Psychic Ability for Images
Psychic Ability for Colors
Notes:
I like to pretend like maybe I can hear one of the other tones on the page. That will set me up for my own demonstration at some point later.
I say that I got the link for the files from a friend who is studying something related to the subject in graduate school.
Don’t immediately have a trick ready to go. You want it to seem like you have to think of something that would suit them based on which tone they could hear.
You could make your own version of these pages in Notion. Then you could send them a URL with one working tone on the page. Then after—or even at an opportune moment during—your performance you could go into the page on your end and edit it so the one that did make a noise, no longer does. So they would hear the noise originally, and then after the trick the sound file would tone-less for them. As if they have gone back to normal after the demonstration burned through the psychic power that had accumulated.
Don’t turn the volume up too much on your phone/computer when you do this. You don’t want the tone to overwhelm them. You just want them to be able to hear it clearly.