Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptops

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” crashed certain laptop models. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the lab they set up to investigate this problem. No artistic judgment.

One discovery made during the research was that playing the video clip also crashed the laptops of some competitors.

And then they discovered something very strange: when they played the video clip on one laptop, the laptop next to it crashed, even though the other laptop wasn’t playing the video clip!

What’s going on?

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

The manufacturer has solved the problem by adding a custom filter to the audio pipeline. This filter detects and removes the interfering frequencies during audio playback.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do Not Remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Although I’m afraid that in the many years since the workaround was added, no one remembers why it’s there. Hopefully their laptops don’t have that audio filter anymore to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they no longer use.)

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

Related: Screaming in the data center.

Bonus chitchat: 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 Laptops, Continued.

¹ Sequel 2: Yes, I know the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not a result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to avoid the comments, “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!”