Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation is best remembered as one of the many anthems of the 80s. But for some technicians and laptop vendors, this song was the bane, a scourge to laptops everywhere, causing them to crash without any warning, and for nearly a decade.
Now, to understand this weird phenomenon, we need to take a trip back in time, at least per the storytelling by Microsoft employee, Raymond Chen. Back in 2022, Chen blogged about his time back when he and a colleague work on the Windows XP team.
His colleague had told him that playing Rhythm Nation on a laptop would crash it. Even more incredible, playing that song while other laptops were nearby would crash them as well. Through a mix of concern and curiosity, Microsoft looked high and low, determined to find out what was compromising the laptops. It was then that the staff found the issue: it was the song.
Turns out, the bassy nature of Rhythm Nation was also the output of a resonant frequency, or resonance, that was hazardous to the hard drives that was used in laptops of that era. Here’s a quick physics resonance: imagine hitting a glass and hearing its “ring” or “clink”. Now, if you take that exact same sound and play it back to the glass, chances are that it’ll shatter. Not higher or lower; the exact same pitch.
As for the hard drives, you need to remember: at the start of the new millenium, SSDs weren’t a thing and all laptops still used mechanical disk drives. Specifically, hard drives that spun at 5,400 RPM. The resonance wasn’t so strong that it was causing the spindle to come into physical contact with the platters, mind you, but it did cause it to move ever so slightly, and that was more than enough to cause data corruption or, in this case, the laptops to hang.
Now, it should also be made clear that the issue was isolated to laptop hard drives only, and not to external models. Microsoft eventually issued a fix to the issue, in the form of a “notch” filter. This filter basically elminated the frequency band that in turn brought about the resonance in Rhythm Nation.
As to how long the filter remained in place, Chen said that it remained from Windows XP till Windows 7, which was from 2001 to 2009. After that year, Microsoft then tried to write a rule in the programming that would essentially disable all Audio Processing Objects (APOs) although this was initially met with resistance from a laptop vendor.
“The vendor applied for an exception to this rule on the grounds that disabling their APO could result in physical damage to the computer,” Chen wrote. “If it were possible to disable their APO, word would get out that “You can get heavier bass if you go through these steps,” and of course you want more bass, right? I mean, who doesn’t want more bass? So people would uncheck the box and enjoy richer bass for a while, and then at some point in the future, the computer would crash mysteriously or (worse) produce incorrect results.”
Again, the deep bassy beats of Rhythm Nation are no longer a threat; since the advent of the SSD meant that moving parts were no longer an issue. Sure, the components have their own resonance but it is unlikely that a head-bopper will be corrupting their data anytime soon.
(Source: PC World, Raymond Chen)
