The Radio in the Attic: How Quiet Static Built Signal to Noise Around a Single Broken Tape

Noor Haddad found the tape in a shoebox while clearing out her grandfather’s house. It was a seven-inch reel, unlabeled, and most of it was unplayable: the oxide had flaked off in patches, and what remained was a hiss broken by a few seconds of a regional weather report. But near the end, under the forecast, there was something else. A second voice, faint and slightly out of sync, reading what sounded like a list of names.

“It was almost certainly crosstalk from another station,” says Haddad, lead writer at Quiet Static. “That happened all the time with old equipment. But I listened to it probably two hundred times trying to make out the names, and at some point I realized that was the game. Not the mystery of what it was, but the act of trying to hear it.”

A studio built around a sound

That recording became the seed of Signal to Noise, which Quiet Static and publisher Paper Lantern Publishing released on September 17 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2. You play the overnight operator at a small regional radio station in the winter of 1987, when a weather band begins carrying voices from Calder Falls, a town that flooded decades earlier. Over seven nights, you record, filter, and splice the transmissions to work out who is speaking and why. Quiet Static was founded in 2022 by Haddad and two former colleagues, and spent most of its first year building only the audio tools, before a single scene of the story was written. On Switch 2, the tape deck and frequency dial can be worked with the touchscreen, which Brandvold calls “the closest thing to having your hands on the real equipment.”

The studio has nine people, and three of them work on audio. Sound designer Elias Brandvold built the game’s tools to behave like real equipment, which meant learning how real equipment fails. The equalizer in the game has the same slightly uneven response as a secondhand studio unit Brandvold bought for reference. The tape deck stretches recordings if you scrub too fast. The frequency dial drifts a little when the station’s heating comes on, which happens at the same time every night. Brandvold recorded much of the game’s ambient sound in a disused community radio station a few hours north of the studio, including the hum of a transmitter its former volunteers switched on for him one last time before it was decommissioned.

Clean audio is boring to solve. The puzzles only work if the tools are a bit unreliable, because then the player has to understand what they’re hearing, not just find the right setting.

Elias Brandvold, sound designer at Quiet Static

Solving with your eyes

A game about listening raises an obvious accessibility question, and Quiet Static says it was one of the first things the team discussed. Every audio puzzle in Signal to Noise can also be approached through a visual waveform and spectrogram mode, and full captions describe not only dialogue but the character of noise: “static, rising,” “a second voice, under the first.” Quiet Static later signed the Open Controls Pledge announced at Autumn Showfloor, and Haddad says the game already meets its baseline. The visual mode is not hidden in a submenu, either. On the first night, the station manager offers it as a piece of equipment the previous operator relied on, so players who choose it never feel they are switching on an assist.

Brandvold says designing the visual mode improved the audio puzzles too. “If a clue couldn’t be represented visually, it was usually because it wasn’t really a clue. It was just a vibe. Making it visible forced us to make it fair.”

Seven nights, several endings

The story branches toward the end, depending on which voices you choose to believe, and Haddad is careful not to say more. She will say the ending most players reach first is not the one the team considers the truest, and that the station logs taped to the studio wall contain more than most people notice on a first playthrough. Quiet Static spent more time on those logs than on any other written material, she says, because they are the one place the game lets you compare what you have heard with what someone else wrote down at the time. Players on the studio’s forums have already found a discrepancy between two entries that the team planted deliberately, and which changes the meaning of one ending.

As for the original tape, it sits in a glass case in Quiet Static’s office. Haddad still does not know whose names were on it. “Making the game was a way of giving it an ending,” she says. “Not the real one. But a good one.”