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Listen to the new Steam Controller buzz to the tune of Doom
Gaming Close Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gaming Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report Listen to the new Steam Controller buzz to the tune of Doom And a bunch of other songs, thanks to the haptic motors in the controller. And a bunch of other songs, thanks to the haptic motors in the controller. by Jay Peters Close Jay Peters Senior Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Jay Peters May 30, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC Link Share Gift Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Part Of Steam Machines have returned: all the news about Valve’s new hardware universe see all updates Jay Peters Close Jay Peters Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. You may have heard that Valve’s new Steam Controller can ring like a telephone or do the Wilhelm scream . But did you know it can sing songs, too? Let me show you. 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. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Jay Peters Close Jay Peters Senior Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Jay Peters Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Gaming Close Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Gaming PC Gaming Close PC Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All PC Gaming Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest an
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