lelandjs posted:

The HD Rumble motors in the joycons aren't the simple unevenly balanced peice of metal attached to a motor that you'd find in your dual shock or Xbox controllers, it's actually a linear resonant actuator—a charge is applied unevenly to an electromagnet hidden in the joycons, which causes it to vibrate back and forth. At low frequencies of vibration, a rumble is felt, and because the amount and frequency of current is controllable, it allows for different and very precise levels of vibration, which Nintendo calls "HD Rumble". If you've got an iPhone 6S or newer, you've got a similar motor in your phone in the "Taptic Engine".

However, a cool hidden "feature" of LRAs is that if they're vibrated quickly enough they start to produce sound! The LRAs in the Steam controller are used to make the tones that sound when the controller is connected or disconnected.

As far as I know, the Golf Story devs appears to be the first studio to intentionally take advantage of the sound producing capabilities of the HD Rumble motors—the HD Rumble in Snake Pass originally made sound, but that's because the devs set the vibration way too high (they probably used the same values from the other console versions, not realizing how differently the joycons' vibration works).