Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” music video has the power to crash a laptop.
The 56-year-old singer released the iconic music video in 1989, and a Microsoft employee has now revealed how it managed to crash laptops around the world.
Raymond Chen, chief software engineer at Microsoft, explained in a blog post: “A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer found a music video playing Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation. Caused some models of computers to crash. Laptops. I don’t want to investigate this in a lab they have to build. Not artistic judgement.
“One of the findings during the investigation was that playing music videos also crashed some competitor laptops.
“Then they discovered something very strange: Playing a music video on one laptop would crash a nearby laptop, even though the other laptop wasn’t playing the video!
“What’s going on here? Turns out this song contains one of the natural resonant frequencies of the 5400 rpm laptop hard drive models they and other manufacturers use. (sic)”
Still, technologists eventually managed to find a solution to the problem.
The blog post continues: “The manufacturer addresses this by adding a custom filter to the audio pipeline that detects and removes problematic frequencies during audio playback.
“And I’m sure they put a digital version of the ‘do not remove’ sticker on that audio filter. (Although I’m concerned that in the many years since the workaround was added, no one remembers why it exists. Hope theirs Laptops are not yet equipped with this audio filter to prevent damage to hard drive models they no longer use.) (sic)”
