Sonic Lead: A Survey of Sound-First Games

"Sonic Lead: A Survey of Sound-First Games" argues that games in which music and sound drive interaction, rather than merely accompanying it, are rare and lack an established classification. The survey aims to organize this field by genre, audio interaction type, and control style, and to identify opportunities for richer sound mechanics, spatial audio, and more nuanced listening modes. Its framework draws on Chion's causal, codal, and reduced modes of listening to explain how design choices encourage different forms of attention.

The survey proposes four broad categories: movement-based rhythm games, musical shooters, spatialization games, and sandbox audio games. Titles range from Beat Saber and Dance Dance Revolution to Rez, Blind Drive, and Electroplankton. Control devices span gamepads, motion controllers, instrument controllers, dance pads, and cameras, while control types include manual, motion, and voice input. The selection covers titles from 1987 to 2024, drawn from Steam tags and Metacritic genre searches.

Its catalog of 43 sound-first games yields the central finding that rhythm mechanics dominate, appearing in 36 of the 43 titles. Pitch and timbre-based gameplay are rare, and spatialization appears in only two titles, Blind Drive and Unheard. Button-based controls are the most common, in 22 titles, with motion, touch, voice, and specialized peripherals appearing less often. The authors conclude that sound-first design remains narrowly focused on rhythm, that the principle is poorly reflected in genre tagging, and that nonmusical sound and reduced listening represent significant untapped potential.

The survey's closing section consists of a reference list spanning music and rhythm game history, music cognition, and soundscape theory, and it adds no independent findings beyond its citations.