For your idea, you could do what a lot of kids toys do, where they have a "cartridge" (puzzle piece, alphabet letter, whatever) which has some notches, so it pushes a combo of switches to select what sound to play

Could also do it with barcodes

i did this with toggle switches in my car, and they're binary, so the 4 gave me 16 options... per mode, i had a mode button too, in radio mode it was either podcasts, a few SDR options, and a few mp3 music genres

then i decided the toggle switches were gonna get embedded in my face if i got in a wreck so i took them out ... there's a reason all the buttons in cars are round and plastic, I guess.