A sound frequency from the famous song “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson has a certain power. It can disrupt the hard drive of a number of Windows XP laptop models.
A Janet Jackson song can crash some Windows XP laptops. The models in question fail to support specific musical notes of the song. This is revealed by Raymond Chen, software engineer at Microsoft. The latter recounts the incident in a blog post.
A music, a bug
In a blog postengineer Raymond Chen explains that Jackson’s hit “Rhythm Nation”, released in 1989, might disrupt the 5400 rpm hard drive used on many laptops.
Initially, Microsoft thought the issue was related to the streaming of music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” song on laptops. But the teams eventually discovered something much stranger. “Playing the video clip on a laptop was causing another nearby laptop to crash, even though the latter was not playing the clip!”writes the engineer.
So, every time the music video was played on a laptop of the brand in question, another laptop nearby would crash. And this, even if this other laptop did not play the video. So just being near a laptop playing the song might cause a crash. The bug therefore had nothing to do with the file itself or a virus.
This is how Microsoft determined that the problem was with laptop hard drives and their natural resonant frequency. This phenomenon of resonance is a property shared by a very large number of objects and physical systems. Different objects are more prone to vibrate at different frequencies.
A history of frequencies
Some objects preferentially absorb energy when subjected to periodically varying forces over time, explains Futura Sciences. The object then vibrates naturally when exposed to some external force. Since sound is a vibration, when an object is struck with a noise corresponding to its natural resonant frequency, it vibrates more in response. For example, on a swing, the rocking motion is amplified when the swing is pushed at regular intervals corresponding to its frequency.
“This song (Rhythm Nation) contained a frequency that matched the natural resonant frequency of the hard drive used by these laptops”, explains Raymond Chen in a video. The origin of the bug was therefore “musical”. One of Rhythm Nation’s sound frequencies coincided with the natural disk resonance frequencies of bug-ridden laptops, causing them to crash. Listening to the song caused the moving disks of the hard drive to vibrate excessively, resulting in a crash.
The solution
Microsoft has since added a custom filter to the sound system of affected Windows XP laptops. This audio filter is able to detect these frequencies and filter them out before they exit the speaker. And so, before they crash the hard drive.
Since these revelations, the “Rhythm Nation” hard drive issue has had its own cybersecurity vulnerability designation as CVE-2022-38392.
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