The Janet Jackson song with power to pulverise laptops
‘Natural frequency’ of 1989 tune caused hard drives to crash, Microsoft reveals
MICROSOFT has revealed that a Janet Jackson song had the power to crash laptops – even on those that it wasn’t playing on.
Engineers found that her 1989 hit Rhythm Nation had a similar effect on certain computers as an opera singer does on shattering a glass when singing in a particular tone.
Simply playing the music video on a laptop with a specific hard drive – in this case, one that went at 5,400 revolutions per minute – was enough to cause it to suddenly shut down.
Not only that, but any other computers within earshot that had the same components would also malfunction in this way.
This bizarre occurrence was due to what is known scientifically as ‘resonance’.
Every object has a frequency at which it vibrates naturally. When the exact same frequency arrives from elsewhere, at that moment the object will suddenly vibrate far more than normal.
In this case, the laptop and the Janet Jackson song had by strange coincidence exactly the same frequency, causing the hard drive to violently shake and crash.
This ‘ resonance’ can be seen when your car shakes as you hit a certain speed or when bridges feel particularly wobbly as the footfall of pedestrians matches its natural frequency.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s principal software engineer Raymond Chen said that a colleague had recently shared the story with him.
He wrote: ‘A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation would crash certain models of laptops.
‘It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5,400rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.’
He added: ‘The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.’
A vulnerability report filed by The Mitre Corporation about the affected laptops in the mid-2000s described how an attacker could force the system to crash using the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video.
Another high-profile example of resonance was when the Millennium Bridge was first opened in 2000 and visitors complained that it was shaking when they walked across it.
This was because the footfall of the crowds packing the bridge made it vibrate slightly, which in turn made them fall spontaneously into step with the bridge’s vibrations – and inadvertently amplify it.
‘Worked around the problem’