An audio recognition game with seven brutal difficulty levels. A sound plays. You identify it. Fill the ring to unlock the track and earn karma. Simple. Except when it's played in reverse. At that point, all bets are off.
The concept is brutally simple. A sound plays. You have to identify it. Every correct answer fills a segment of the Sound Ring. Complete the ring and you unlock the full track — and earn a bonus karma drop.
A clip plays — anything from a familiar household object to a field recording from the Amazon to a completely unidentifiable industrial process. The clip length depends on your difficulty level — 10 seconds on Easy, much shorter on the harder tiers.
Type your answer, select from a shortlist or speak it — depending on the mode. On Easy you can pause and replay the clip. On God Like! it plays once, in reverse, and you have ten seconds to answer. Good luck with that.
Every correct answer fills one segment of the Sound Ring — a visualisation that wraps around the current track. Complete the full ring and you unlock the full track to download, earn 1,000 bonus points and a karma drop into your OASIS avatar.
Pick your difficulty. Or let it pick you.
Every track has a Sound Ring — a circular visualisation of segments, one per sound in that track's library. Identify a sound correctly and its segment lights up. Complete the full ring and the track unlocks.
Every correct answer, every completed ring, every difficulty milestone earns karma that carries directly into your OASIS avatar. The harder the level, the bigger the reward. God Like! completions earn a permanent profile badge.
What's That Sound? was first designed and nearly fully built in 2012 — a Windows 8 Metro app. The Sound Ring idea came directly from the ring segment dial controls David was experimenting with in the Metro UI — he saw the control, immediately knew what it should be used for, and the game was born. The difficulty levels were spec'd out. The ring mechanic worked. It was nearly there.
Then his laptop was stolen. All of it — gone. He was more upset about losing the code than the laptop itself. The laptop was replaceable. What's That Sound? wasn't — not easily, and not at that moment. From that point on he backed everything up every night, auto-syncing to his PC and OneDrive. He never lost code like that again.
He burned out not long after and was ill for two years from 2013. What's That Sound? never got rebuilt. But like everything else on the list — it was always planned, always meant to exist.
Thirteen years later, the Sound Ring is back. Not as a Windows 8 Metro app but as a full OASIS OAPP — with seven difficulty levels, karma integration, a giant speaker shop inside Our World, and a God Like! mode that plays everything in reverse. Better than the original. Worth every year of the wait.
"The idea was always that the sounds should exist inside Our World too — there's a giant speaker shop in the game where you can walk in and play them. The app and the world feed each other. And yes, there is a level called God Like! where everything plays backwards. It seemed like the only honest name for it."
What's That Sound? isn't a standalone game — it's wired into the OASIS ecosystem. Your karma earns here carry across every game. The speaker shop exists inside Our World. And your OASIS mood affects how the game rewards you.