Soundtrack: SUPERHOT — Composing Without Any Music

Introduction — a room where nothing is playing

Stand in the white room and you hear nothing. Only a low hum sits somewhere behind your ears. Until you move, the room stays completely still.

SUPERHOT is a first-person shooter where time advances only as far as you do. As Komugi's review reads it, this is also a puzzle wearing a gun. But what I'm covering today isn't its 'music' — because this game has no music to begin with.SUPERHOT (from the Steam store page)

The instant you first move, a filtered gunshot slowly tears through the space. With no track playing under it, the full weight of that single shot lands directly on your ear.

The puzzle's own trait — your speed of movement becomes the speed of sound

The sound was built by sound designer Artur Walaszczyk, who chose an authentic-feeling quiet over a cinematic score. According to The Sound Architect's review, the only things constantly playing are a low sustained tone, a beep, and the nostalgic sound of a dial-up connection.

Once combat starts, the sound goes muffled and loses its top end. Gunshots and impacts are pitched and slowed to match how fast time is currently moving for you. In place of music, your own speed becomes the BPM.

The moment you die and the level resets, a flood of glitch sounds arrives — as if you'd been folded back into a single line of code. Instead of laying down a track, the game makes your own action the only sound there is.

A hidden link to the experience — a noisy sequel answers the silence

The 2020 expansion, SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE, gave the opposite answer to that silence. Scoring it fell to Federico Ágreda, known as Zardonic, credited with all but single-handedly carving out the genre Metal & Bass. He's also written music for Redout 2 and Sega's Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

Unlike the original, this one plays a real, unmistakable score. A drum-and-bass barrage traces the mounting panic of a protagonist whose memory is being rewritten. During the finale's 2.5-hour real-time credits roll, the Polish rock band Cool Kids of Death's 'Niech Wszystko Spłonie' reportedly plays before the score shifts into chiptune partway through.

That swing from silence to full volume maps onto the series' whole claim: the world only moves because you decide to move it. Whether the music goes silent or roars, your own action is what pulls the trigger either way.

The puzzle analogy — thinking is free, and the sound only bills you the instant you move

Most puzzle games play some ambient bed to fill the long stretches of thinking. SUPERHOT doesn't. If you don't move, neither time nor sound moves either — thinking, here, simply costs no sound at all.

In exchange, the moment you move your body, every sound arrives at once, aimed straight at you — and only at the speed you chose. Move slowly and it rumbles slowly; move fast and the sound turns sharp too.

I think of this as a game where you tap out your own BPM. The music doesn't set the tempo first; your next move does. It's a design that bets everything on never laying down the sheet music in advance.

Tracks worth hearing — one piece that plays after the silence

Start with Zardonic's Superhot (Hyperhot Mix) ↗, his own, even more aggressive rebuild of MIND CONTROL DELETE's signature track. Knowing the silence of the original first makes the weight of all this sound land harder. From Zardonic's official channel.

To hear the whole soundtrack, there's SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE Soundtrack 2020 ↗, all 20 tracks streamed end to end on his own channel. It's worth taking in the whole road from a silent original to a score this loud.

The same music is also available on the Steam OST DLC and on Spotify.

Closing — the one thing I'd steal if I were composing

If I were to steal one thing here, it's the nerve to make total silence out of every moment nothing is happening. Most of us get scared of silence and want to fill it with something. SUPERHOT wasn't afraid of it.

The more you strip out sound from the moments of inaction, the more value each sound gains the instant you act. I think that idea carries over directly, not just to composing, but to a puzzle game's UI sound too.

Tonight, black coffee in hand, I plan to listen to the original's silence and the Hyperhot Mix back to back. I expect I'll notice again that quiet and noise both trace back to the same single point: moving time with your own hand.

Reference links

・Steam: SUPERHOT official store page

・The Sound Architect: SUPERHOT Game Audio Review (on sound designer Artur Walaszczyk's work)

・Steam: SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE Soundtrack (official OST DLC)

・Zardonic — official YouTube channel

・Wikipedia: Zardonic (Federico Ágreda, Metal & Bass composer)

・Wikipedia: Superhot: Mind Control Delete