August 16th, 2022

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.

One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

What’s going on?

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

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.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)

And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹

Related: Shouting in the Datacenter.

Bonus chatter: Video version of this story and a Twitter poll.

Also, Larry Osterman had a similar experience with a specific game that crashed a prototype PC.

Follow-up: Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers, follow-up.

¹ Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

24 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

Newest
Newest Popular Oldest
  • Alexis Talbot

    This kind of issues are still very much present in today's storage servers. I work for a company who specializes in Acoustic simulation and we help some customers to avoid having resonances create reading / writing problems in hard drives. The source of the noise / vibrations is often the cooling fan as companies are trying to compact more and more hard drives in the same volume, putting more constraint on the power for the...

    Read more
  • Earlisa Norman

    Dang it! I was gonna play it on my phone at work & shut the office down but it’s been resolved! 🤬😠😡

  • Owen Rubin

    I guess they were lucky in the recording studio that none of their machines had such drives. That would be some support call: “Every time we try and record this song all our machines crash!” I can just imagine that support call to Microsoft.

  • Gonch Gardner

    Yes and a colleague once told me gullible had been removed from the dictionary.

  • Petri Oksanen

    There is also the story of the resonant frequency of chicken skulls from the old Borland Turbo C++ documentation:
    https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequency+of+a+chicken%2527s+skull

    Quote:
    True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
    frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
    This was determined empirically in
    Australia, where a new factory
    generating 7-Hz tones was located too
    close to a chicken ranch: When the
    factory started up, all the chickens
    died.

    Read more
  • unforseen consequencer

    Why did they ruined the audio instead of making proper isolation for hard drives though? Filtering out frequencies from the audio without user’s consent because of crappy hardware is a very ugly workaround. And laptops can still be crashed by malicious actor using other audio devices.

  • Jasper Nuyens

    Original message posted on the 1st of April 1997? 😉

  • microsoftonline-com · Edited

    Mr. Chen, could you please clarify if your colleague in Windows XP product support witnessed this or if this is one of those urban legends that happened to "a friend of a friend". Also, I'm wondering how you feel about CVE 2022-38392 which is entirely based on this blog entry. While it is hilarious to think that Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation is a Denial of Service attack, it seems almost preposterous that a laptop could...

    Read more
    • Jonathan Brochu · Edited

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall my physics lessons correctly, resonance has little to do with the speed of rotation of an object**, and more about the natural frequency of vibration for that object, which is linked to (1) its length, and (2) the speed of a wave traveling through that object (the latter affected by object composition, e.g. aluminum, steel, etc.; its stiffness/thickness, i.e. the stiffer it is the faster it'll...

      Read more
      • Ron ParkerMicrosoft employee

        I think it's more complicated than that, even. Resonant modes of a flat disc with a hole in it would be determined by a set of partial differential equations that I don't even want to think about, but the solution would also depend on how the disc is supported - that is, if you took the platter out of the drive and hung it on a string, it would have different resonance than it does...

        Read more
    • erkcan erkcan

      > As it happens, 5400 Hz is a smidge higher than E6.

      @microsoftonline-com : 5400 rpm is 90 Hz. How is 5400 Hz relevant? 🙂

    • MGetz

      > Did they not have proper damping of vibrations?

      Many consumer laptops even as recently as 2013 didn't bother with any sort of dampening because that would increase cost. Netbooks (what anecdotes from other commenters seem to indicate was the likely place this occurred) would definitely not have had any due to both size and cost reasons. 10¢ of rubber dampening matters a lot when competing in the sub $300 category sadly. When you build...

      Read more
    • erkcan erkcan

      Thanks for asking this question, this sounds like one of those stories that are too good to be true. If confirmed, it would make an excellent example while teaching the physics of resonances. So any sort of further detail would be very much appreciated.

    • Brendan Bonner

      The story seems to centre around the video, which contains around 20 seconds of just above sub-bass at around 50Hz to 100Hz with a couple of strong 82.4Hz amongst it. Surprised it didn’t happen more (if the drives were built to not dampen this)!

    • Raymond ChenMicrosoft employee Author · Edited

      My colleague claims to have been part of the team that investigated the problem. I accept his word for it. (I also think the CVE is somebody playing a joke.)

Read next