Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)

2025-12-2717:16310124devblogs.microsoft.com

Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.

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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” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.

One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

What’s going on?

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

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)

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

Related: Shouting in the Datacenter.

Bonus chatter: 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 laptop computers, follow-up.

¹ Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments.

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Comments

By knuckleheads 2025-12-2717:561 reply

Very funny, reminds me of how Jennifer Lopez created Google Image Search when she wore a very deep cut green dress in 2000. So many people searched for "Jennifer Lopez Green Dress" that the search team realized they needed to include images in the search results. https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-european-c... https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-walks-in-versa...

By leobg 2025-12-2723:375 reply

If this hadn’t been published in 2015, you’d all call it AI slop:

> When the German engineer Karl Benz invented the first petroleum-powered automobile, he did not just create an engine with wheels; he set in motion an industry that revolutionized the way society was structured.

By cjs_ac 2025-12-280:16

LLMs write like a high-schooler padding out an essay about something they only pretend to care about with vacuous adjectives and adverbs because that’s how most commercial writing reads.

By deIeted 2025-12-282:061 reply

Well, that's human slop, and it's actually more insidious than AI slop. You know what's weird? We've had this for almost twenty years. This human slop in writing this is the first time ever that this painful writing has been addressed by someone else on a comment on the internet. I've raised it so many times, but it's the first time I've ever seen one other person acknowledge it. Like, how crazy is that? Is the last twenty years been a fever dream?

By bananaflag 2025-12-288:54

I've seen a lot of comments discussing how recipe pages are filled with this sort of human slop. But not blog posts in general.

By nkrisc 2025-12-281:53

Well sure, no one thinks LLMs invented bad writing, but they do copy the style.

By behringer 2025-12-2822:03

All he had to do to fix this was say "he drove forward" instead of set in motion. So close to a great simile.

By tomcam 2025-12-283:49

Not sure I agree. It's a fact.

By tzury 2025-12-2719:013 reply

https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...

Example (for both functions):

    /* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds.

      True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
      frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
      This was determined empirically in
      Australia, where a new factory
      generating 7-Hz tones was located too
      close to a chicken ranch: When the
      factory started up, all the chickens
      died.

      Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */

 #include 

   int main(void)
   {
     sound(7);
     delay(10000);
     nosound();
     return 0;
   }

from the comments over there (2002)

By sandermvanvliet 2025-12-2719:111 reply

Not very likely

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400

By maxbond 2025-12-2721:161 reply

I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters. Their coop could though.

By thaumasiotes 2025-12-280:251 reply

> I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters.

Without disputing the conclusion, is the wavelength the right measurement, or should that be half the wavelength?

By maxbond 2025-12-281:37

That's a more natural way to consider the resonance, certainly. What I was getting at is that if we were using a 7hz tone to explore a big room, we couldn't tell if there was a chicken in there or not. We'd have a hard time sensing an elephant. Let alone exert enough of a force to harm. Because the wave is so much larger that they barely interact.

By jasonwatkinspdx 2025-12-2720:274 reply

You're not generating a 7 hz tone on any sort of conventional audio gear, and definitely not a pc speaker.

By clolege 2025-12-2723:021 reply

The SVS PB-17 Ultra advertises a range of 12-220Hz at -3dB. I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.

And most speakers can play infrasound for many non-sinusoidal waveforms [0]. They'll drop the fundamental and some lower-end harmonics but can still give a sense of what it sounds like

[0] https://szynalski.com/tone#7,saw,v0.5

By jasonwatkinspdx 2025-12-281:071 reply

> I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.

You're misunderstanding the numbers here. Going from 12 to 7 Hz is most of an octave, nearly doubling wavelengths.

Also SVS's numbers are gonna be the usual marketing stuff, so they're assuming a fat room gain curve, and just looking at their website they have a disclaimer on their graphs that it doesn't represent actual total output capability. Which is a way of hiding that if you actually try to drive it that hard that low with ~3kw electrical in those voice coils are going to torch.

The non lying way to prove that claim is to show large signal Kipple results including the heat soak. They ain't doin' that here.

Basically stuff going this low is really exotic and more in the realm of servos that simulate earthquakes than traditional transducers.

Tom Danley is the world expert on this sort of thing. He used to build stuff like ultrasonic levitation ovens and full scale sonic boom simulators for JPL/NASA.

In the audio world he was first famous as the tech lead behind ServoDrive. This now defunct company made special effects subwoofers using DC rotary servo motors to drive the diaphragm. They were used as special effects subs in that era by big acts like Garth Brooks. But they didn't catch on outside that niche because very little music has significant content below 40 hz as it just turns into a muddy rumble that harms sound quality as a whole. So to use these sorts of things you have to mix for it specifically. Cinema goes lower with the rumbles down to 15hz, but that's basically it.

Getting anything that's like a clean tone at 7hz is not gonna happen without a purpose built device.

FWIW Tom Danley started his own company[1] after Servo Drive failed on the business side, where he focuses on large scale horn speakers using novel topologies. They're among the best in the business at what they. Again, they don't have anything that even remotely tries to go down to 7hz.

[1]: https://www.danleysoundlabs.com/

Tom's a nice guy, I've traded emails with him a few times over the years. He used to be pretty active on the DIY speaker building mailing lists sharing his very in depth knowledge freely.

By Jap2-0 2025-12-281:54

For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16', or 32' long).

By zahlman 2025-12-283:131 reply

If I feed a 7hz input to some cheap hand-made thing like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liSEwqdq7aA , will it not vibrate at 7hz and thus produce a 7hz "tone" (disregarding that humans won't perceive that as sound, at least not the fundamental)?

By jasonwatkinspdx 2025-12-284:19

No, because reproducing the fundamental is the thing. Saying otherwise is kinda like me saying I'm gonna take a voice call, run it through a filter that generates a ton of distortion harmonics, then seperate out those distortion harmonics, and then call it a "tone" of your voice.

But also the original post was about a 7hz tone somehow resonating with a chicken's skull cavity, which if you know the basic wave equation relating wavelength with frequency is an absurdity. The waves involved are multiple orders of magnitude too big to couple to a volume that small. They'll just diffract around like nothing.

By tzs 2025-12-2816:22

Who said the source has to stationary? Doppler shift for the win.

By conradojordan 2025-12-2815:53

You can with your hands, just shake them

By conradojordan 2025-12-2815:52

An easier way to generate a 7 Hz tone is to just move your hands back and forth 7 times a second. Either way you won't be able to hear because we can't hear 7 Hz anyway

By OisinMoran 2025-12-2720:52

Reminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there is a phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by playing a record titled I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X.

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