Here’s the new Steam Controller performing the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. 2:
Here is “Still Alive” from Portal — fitting for Valve hardware:
I even made it play Doom:
Are you wondering how the controller, which does not have a speaker, is able to make audio at all? Valve’s first Steam Controller, even though it was discontinued, was a great gadget for tinkerers — someone even wrote an open-source program to make it “sing.” Fast forward to now, less than a month after the launch of the second-generation Steam Controller, and some enterprising people have used that program to make it “sing” as well.
“The way the controller makes noise is through the haptic motors in the trackpads,” CrazyCritic89, the person behind the “Still Alive” and Super Mario Bros. 2 videos, tells The Verge. Those motors usually provide feedback as your thumb glides over the trackpads, or let you “press” them like a button, even though they don’t actually click down. But the haptic motors can also vibrate at “specific frequencies, essentially like a speaker,” CrazyCritic explains. Valve uses that to make the controller play sounds, and if you want to make your controller sing, you can now do that too.
With CrazyCritic89’s “Steam Haptics Singer,” which is available on GitHub in Windows and Linux versions, you can have your Steam Controller (either generation) or your Steam Deck play MIDI tracks — simple digital music files that contain notes rather than actual recorded audio. To make my personal Steam Controller play some music, I found some MIDI files online and followed CrazyCritic89’s instructions. It took a bit of tinkering — I had to spend some time with the terminal in desktop mode on my Steam Deck to actually make my Steam Controller sing. But when I heard the first notes from my controller, I was grinning from ear to ear.
Valve currently doesn’t offer a way to customize the Steam Controller’s sounds natively through Steam. We actually asked the company about it in April, and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that while “it’s possible that there’s going to be more both configurability and customization for that in the future,” the team isn’t focused on that right now. If Valve does make a sound customization tool, Griffais suggested it would be some sort of SDK or a tool that everyone could use, and Valve might consider making one if the team sees enough demand.
There is precedent: After seeing Steam Deck users sideload their own custom boot videos that appear when you power on the handheld, Valve made it an official Steam Deck feature so anyone can join in. It even offers a special spot in the Steam store to get additional boot videos from Valve. For now, the Steam Haptics Singer will do.