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A researcher discovered that Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" caused crashing among laptop hard drives. Here's the explanation. Tech Times

A recent study shared by Raymond Chen, a principal software engineer at Microsoft, showed that some Windows XP laptops crashed due to playing the Rhythm Nation music video by Janet Jackson. The song apparently contained a sound that caused hard drives to crash.

Microsoft Software Engineer Witnessed How The SongDamaged Different Laptop Hard Drives

The study was uploaded to Chen's blog, The Old New Thing, which shared how a "major computer manufacturer" found out how their computers would crash when trying to play the song. To make things more interesting, playing the song on one laptop would even crash another laptop nearby.

The specific music video that reportedly crashed the laptops was Janet Jackson's 2019 Rhythm Nation. The manufacturer also found that the issue wasn't limited to just them and kept happening to laptops from other companies.

Raymond Chen's Explained The Reason About The Crashing Issues Among Old Laptops

Raymond Chen explained the odd discovery in more detail in a video uploaded by Windows Dev Docs on Twitter. The reason for this occurrence is that the song contained a "frequency" that matched the natural frequency of the hard drive.

In an article by Gizmodo, it was clarified that it wasn't the music video itself that caused damage to the hard drives but a specific frequency found in the song.

'Rhythm Nation' Has Similarities to Sounds That Can Break Glasses

This resulted in the manufacturer having to write a special audio filter to detect the frequencies and filter them out before they could make their way out of the speaker. This is to avoid future damage to the laptop's hard drive.

According to the story by The Verge, the song resonated with a specific laptop hard drive model, as per Chen. This means that the occurrence can be likened to when someone plays a specific sound capable of shattering a wine glass.

Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation Included Vibrations that Caused Hard Drives to Crash

The sound coming from the speakers when Janet Jackson's music video played would make the laptop's hard drive vibrate, resulting in the computer's hard drive crashes. Instead of finding hardware or other solutions to this issue, the manufacturers decided to filter the specific frequency altogether.

The Verge notes that the story remains light on specifications since there was no list of laptops affected by the issue. Chen also did not provide a video of the laptops crashing when the song was playing.

Data Center Engineers were Able to Disrupt Hard Drives by Screaming

To provide more context as to how sound affects the status of a hard drive, a 2008 video was shown where data center engineers were able to disrupt hard drives simply by screaming at them.

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Another Similar Demonstration Happened in 2017

A similar demonstration was uploaded in 2017 on GitHub, showing how Alfredo Ortega, a security researcher, could play a sound that crashed hard drives due to it including their resonant frequency.

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Written by Urian B.