Almost forty years after the release of her first album, Janet Jackson is back on tour. In the coming weeks, a new project called Black Diamond will succeed Unbreakable, released in 2015. It will be understood, the 56-year-old artist is “unbreakable” like a “black diamond”. And even stronger than that. According to an article published by The Verge, sa chanson Rhythm Nation can crash some computers.
“If it is normal for our friends to judge our musical tastes […]our devices generally have no say in our listening habits”, is having fun the site specializing in technologies. However, a major PC manufacturer noticed that this piece, from 1989, systematically caused a hard drive failure on certain laptops twenty years ago.
In a note published on August 16 on his blog, The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen reports this unbelievable experience without mentioning the name of the company that made this discovery. But the Microsoft IT engineer adds that this was also true for other brands. Even more surprising, Rhythm Nation is able to crash a computer placed next to the one broadcasting the song.
The right frequency
To understand this strange phenomenon, you should know that platter hard drives have a mechanism that exposes them to vibrations. Subjected to certain frequencies, their structure is agitated and jammed. However, observes Raymond Chen, Rhythm Nation “contains one of the natural resonant frequencies” affected hard drives, which were spinning at 5,400 revolutions per minute. In other words, its sound waves, once propagated by the loudspeakers, are perfectly calibrated to disrupt these devices.
It’s a bit like when “someone plays a specific sound to break a crystal glass”Explain The Verge. The experiment is however difficult to reproduce today, because this type of hard disk was fitted to laptops equipped with the Windows-XP operating system, which was marketed in 2001. Not to mention that, since the discovery, the manufacturer has designed a filter preventing his computers from playing the problematic frequency.
Other experiments of this kind exist however, recalls The Verge. In 2008, an engineer had fun shouting in a data center to show the damage it could have. And five years ago, researcher Alfredo Ortega went so far as to invent a program capable of crashing hard drives to music.