Some pop songs enliven people and get them into the groove, but for a chart-topping hit of music legend Janet Jackson in 1989, the effect was so engrossing that laptop users playing the song’s music video caused their hardware to crash.
Repeated Playback of ‘Rhythm Nation’ Led to Laptops, Nearby PCs to Crash
Jackson’s fans using Windows XP-run laptops at the time who repeatedly played back the video of the 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation” made their laptop hard drives crash, according to Microsoft principal software pengineer Raymond Chen in his “The Old New Thing” blog post.
The video is considered one of the artist’s most acclaimed videos, having received the MTV Video Vanguard Award, among others, through the years and established Jackson as one of the most influential performers of her generation.
Chen quoted an unnamed “major computer manufacturer” as discovering that some of their computers were crashing when trying to play the song and that playing the song on one laptop could even crash another nearby computer. The laptop maker also found out that the issue likewise on other manufacturers’ laptops.
Here’s our first video from our new series with Raymond Chen, @ChenCravat.
We asked him to tell us about the mystery wherein some music would crash a laptop!!?? pic.twitter.com/BRgfsWEaaC
— Windows Dev Docs (@WindowsDocs) August 12, 2022
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‘Rhythm Nation’ Emitted Sound That Caused Hard Drives to Crash
Chen claims the company eventually found out that “Rhythm Nation” contained a sound in it that resonated with a certain model of laptop hard drive. Sound waves the computer’s speakers made while playing the song would make its hard drive vibrate, thus crashing the computer. Chen then narrated that the manufacturer figured out a simple fix to address the issue: making their computers not play in that specific frequency.
Chen however did not mention which laptops or hard drives were affected by the issue, or did he provide visual proof o a laptop actually crashing while playing the song. However, it remains a delightful anecdote about the exceedingly those weird things physics can do to our computers and the process of determining what caused the problem.
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Desctructive Force of Resonant Frequencies
Engineers troubleshooting this issue could have experienced a special type of nightmare, but it is common knowledge hard drives are extraordinarily susceptible to all types of vibrations. In his blog, Chen links to a video from 2008 that shows engineers disrupting hard drives by screaming at them, and in 2017, security researcher Alfredo Ortega demonstrated a program that crashes hard drives by playing a sound at their resonant frequency. The program even warns that it could physically damage the drive – resonance frequencies can actually be superbly damaging. These frequencies have caused suspension bridges collapsing. In fact, the Stuxnet malware was said to have taken advantage of resonant frequencies to destroy centrifuges.
Security researchers have also demonstrated how hard drives can be used as microphones to snoop on people’s conversations, due to the fact that they react to sounds.
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