For anyone confused off the bat, what you just watched was someone do something called cardistry. Cardistry is the art of shuffling a deck of cards as aesthetically as possible and has only been around for a few decades at this point. Starting as just people expanding on card sleights done by magicians to show off, people have curated this skill and developed it into something that carries itself as elegant and creative. Despite being such a visual art form, music and sound have become such large parts of what make it so unique.
Tobias Levin, the man seen in the video above, is widely known for his impact on this community. Here I am bringing attention specifically to how he has utilized sound design in his tracks though to reshape how cardistry can be perceived. Cardistry for the longest time through the early 2000’s and into the 2010’s was not a serene and satisfying thing. Being referred to at the time as XCM, aka Xtreme Card Maneuvers (I know… it’s a terrible name), “cardistry” was all about wild video editing, intense music, and trying to do the craziest stunt possible with cards. People aggressively throwing card packets around over heavy synthe or rock tracks was the normal.
What Tobias did though with this video though changed the game and showed people a whole different side to what a cardistry video could be like. By focusing less on how intense he could make his cuts seem and focusing instead on the natural sounds the cards make when being shuffled slowly, he highlighted the serene nature cardistry can have. Pairing this with a softer synthesized track by his good friend and cardist alike, Oliver Sogard, he also truly changes how everything is being perceived. The slides and clacks of the paper pair perfectly with the audio and influenced a generation of cardists to focus less on intensity and more on the beauty of what they can do.
Audio is an extremely powerful thing and has the ability to fully change how something is perceived. This example, as niche as it is, highlights perfectly how that can play out. Cardistry is full of examples where audio mixes are utilized perfectly to do this. Feel free to ever ask me for more examples if you’d like and I’d be happy to give some!