Experience the new Steam Controller as it syncs with the iconic sounds of Doom.

You might have heard that Valve’s latest Steam Controller can ring like a phone or even replicate the Wilhelm scream. But did you know it can also belt out tunes? Let’s dive in.

Check out the Steam Controller jamming to the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. 2:
Here’s it performing “Still Alive” from Portal — a perfect fit for Valve gear:
And I even got it to play some Doom:

Curious how a controller without a speaker can produce sound? The original Steam Controller, though discontinued, was a favorite among modders — someone even created an open-source program that allowed it to “sing.” Fast forward to the recent launch of the second-generation Steam Controller, and creative minds have adapted that program to make it sing again.

“The controller generates sound through the haptic motors in the trackpads,” explains CrazyCritic89, the creator behind the “Still Alive” and Super Mario Bros. 2 videos. These motors typically provide feedback as your thumb glides over the trackpads or allow you to “press” them like buttons, even though they don’t actually click. However, these haptic motors can also vibrate at “specific frequencies, essentially like a speaker,” CrazyCritic adds. Valve leverages this feature to enable sound playback, and now you can make your controller sing too.

With CrazyCritic89’s “Steam Haptics Singer,” available on GitHub for both Windows and Linux, you can have your Steam Controller (from either generation) or your Steam Deck play MIDI tracks — simple digital music files that contain notes instead of recorded audio. To get my Steam Controller to play some music, I found a few MIDI files online and followed CrazyCritic89’s guide. It required a bit of tinkering — I had to navigate the terminal in desktop mode on my Steam Deck to get my Steam Controller to sing. But when those first notes came through, I couldn’t help but smile.

Currently, Valve doesn’t provide a built-in way to customize the Steam Controller’s sounds through Steam. We reached out to the company back in April, and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned 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 prioritizing it at the moment. If Valve does decide to create a sound customization tool, Griffais hinted it might be some sort of SDK or a user-friendly tool, depending on demand.

There’s a precedent for this: after noticing Steam Deck users sideloading custom boot videos that play on startup, Valve made it an official feature, allowing everyone to join in. They even set up a special section in the Steam store for additional boot videos. For now, the Steam Haptics Singer is a fun workaround.