Listen to the new Steam Controller sound to the Doom soundtrack

Here’s the new Steam Controller doing the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros 2:

Here is “Still Life” from Portal – suitable for Valve equipment:

I even made it to play Destruction:

Are you wondering how a controller, which does not have a speaker, can produce audio at all? Valve’s first Steam controller, though it was terminatedit was a great tool for enthusiasts – someone wrote an open source program making a “sing”. Fast forward to now, less than a month after the launch of second generation Steam Controllerand some business people have used this program to “sing” as well.

“The way the controller generates sound is through the haptic motors in the trackpads,” CrazyCritic89, who is behind “Still Alive” and Super Mario Bros 2 videos, he says Seaside. These motors often provide feedback when your finger is hovering over the trackpad, or allow you to “press” it like a button, even if it doesn’t press down. But haptic motors can also vibrate at “specific frequencies, especially as a speaker,” says CrazyCritic. Valve uses this to make the controller play, and if you want your controller to play, you can do that too.

It’s CrazyCritic89’s “Steam Haptics Singer,” that is available on GitHub in Windows and Linux versions, you can have your Steam Controller (regardless of generation) or your Steam Deck music playing MIDI – simple digital files that contain notes rather than recorded sounds. To make my Steam Controller play music, I found MIDI files online and followed CrazyCritic89’s advice. It took me a while to figure it out – I had to spend some time with the terminal in desktop mode on my Steam Deck to get my Steam Controller to call. But when I heard the first notes from my supervisor, I was grinning from ear to ear.

Valve currently does not offer a way to change the Steam Controller’s voice output natively through Steam. We asked the company about this in April, and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told us Seaside that while “it is possible that there will be more configurability and customization that in the future,” the team is not focused on it right now. If Valve were to develop a voice editing tool, Griffais said it would be some kind of SDK or tool that anyone could use, and Valve would consider developing one if the team sees enough demand.

There is an example: When you see Steam Deck users downloading their videos that they shoot to appear when you have the power at hand, Valve made it a government Steam scale Side by side for everyone to join. They even offer a special place in the steam store to find other videos from Valve. Meanwhile, the Steam Haptics Player will do.