You’ve probably heard of the urban legends of how marching soldiers or just having a lot of pedestrians on a bridge can cause catastrophic destruction due to hitting the natural resonant frequency of it causing a build up of vibration and movement. As it turns out, not only is that true, but it can also affect hard drives. And perhaps an even weirder fact is that Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit, the now ironically named Rhythm Nation, can actually hit hard drives hard enough to kill them.
As told by Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer and author of ‘The Old New Thing’, a colleague of his told him a story from the Windows XP days, where a major computer manufacturer found that when they played Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, it would crash certain laptop models. Not only were their own laptops affected, but also that of their competitors. It gets even stranger, as one of these laptops didn’t even need to actually be playing the song. Just being turned on while the song was being played nearby was enough to crash it.
Here's our first video from our new series with Raymond Chen, @ChenCravat.
— Windows Dev Docs (@WindowsDocs) August 12, 2022
We asked him to tell us about the mystery wherein some music would crash a laptop!!?? pic.twitter.com/BRgfsWEaaC
It turns out that Rhythm Nation actually contained one of the natural resonant frequencies of the 5400rpm hard drive that they and their rivals had fitted on these laptops. The actual model was not mentioned, but according to CVE, this OEM model hard drive was common in laptops shipped around 2005. In order to fix it, this manufacturer ended up placing a custom filter in the audio pipeline which can detect sounds in that resonant frequency and remove it during playback.
It’s a strange case of hardware destruction, but if you know about the terror these resonant frequencies can cause you probably won’t be as surprised. Natural resonant frequencies have caused plenty of trouble over the years of course, such as the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster in 1940 and the huge swaying suffered by the Millennium Bridge in 2000.
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