There are all manner of musical myths, covering tones and melodies that have effects ranging from the profound to the supernatural. The Pied Piper, for example, or the infamous “brown note.”
But what about a song that could crash your laptop just by playing it? Even better, a song that could crash nearby laptops in the vicinity, too? It’s not magic, and it’s not a trick—it was just a punchy pop song that Janet Jackson wrote back in 1989.
Rhythm Nation
As told by Microsoft’s Raymond Chen, the story begins in the early 2000s during the Windows XP era. Engineers at a certain OEM laptop manufacturer noticed something peculiar. Playing Janet Jackson’s song Rhythm Nation through laptop speakers would cause the machines to crash. Even more bizarrely, the song could crash nearby laptops that weren’t even playing the track themselves, and the effect was noted across laptops of multiple manufacturers.
Rhythm Nation was a popular song from Jackson’s catalog, but nothing about it immediately stands out as a laptop killer.
After extensive testing and process of elimination, the culprit was identified as the audio frequencies within the song itself. It came down to the hardware of the early 2000s laptops in question. These machines relied on good old mechanical hard drives. Specifically, they used 2.5-inch 5,400 RPM drives with spinning platters, magnetic heads, and actuator arms.
Unlike today’s solid-state drives, these components were particularly susceptible to physical vibration. Investigation determined that something in Rhythm Nation was hitting a resonant frequency of some component of the drive. When this occurred, the drive would be disturbed enough that read errors would stack up to the point where it would trigger a crash in the operating system. The problem wasn’t bad enough to crash the actual hard drive head into the platters themselves, which would have created major data loss. It was just bad enough to disrupt the hard drive’s ability to read properly, to the point where it could trigger a crash in the operating system.
There was a simple workaround for this problem, that was either ingenious or egregious depending on your point of view. Allegedly, the OEM simply whipped up a notch filter for the audio subsystem to remove the offending frequencies. The filter apparently remained in place from the then-contemporary Windows XP up until at least Windows 7. At this point, Microsoft created a new rule for “Audio Processing Objects” (APO) which included things like the special notch filter. The rule stated that all of these filters must be able to be switched off if so desired by the user. However, the story goes that the manufacturer gained a special exception for some time to leave their filter APO on at all times, to prevent users disabling it and then despairing when their laptops suddenly started crashing unexpectedly during Janet Jackson playlists.
As for what made Rhythm Nation special? YouTuber Adam Neely investigated, and came up with a compelling theory. Having read a research paper on the vibrational behavior of a 2.5-inch 5,400 RPM laptop hard disk, he found that it reported the drive to have its largest vibrational peak at approximately 87.5 Hz. Meanwhile, he also found that Rhythm Nation had a great deal of energy at 84.2 Hz. Apparently, the recording had been sped up a touch after the recording process, pushing the usual low E at 82 Hz up slightly higher. The theory being that the mild uptuning in Rhythm Nation pushed parts of the song close enough to the resonant frequency of some of the hard drive’s components to give them a good old shaking, causing the read errors and eventual crashes.
It’s an interesting confluence of unintended consequences. A singular pop song from 1989 ended up crashing laptops over a decade later, leading to the implementation of an obscure and little-known audio filter. The story still has holes—nobody has ever come forward to state officially which OEM was involved, and which precise laptops and hard drives suffered this problem. That stymies hopes for further research and recreation of this peculiarity. Nevertheless, it’s a fun tech tale from the days when computers were ever so slightly more mechanical than they are today.
What would make windows XP not to crash anyway 😂
Tinny and tiny laptop speakers can play 84Hz? Not that I’ve noticed!
Wish I could thumbs up you, because this whole story sounds very suspect.
Especially as so many of the laptop drives around that era were 4200RPM or (vague memory here) slower.
3600
Nowhere does it say it “crashed every HDD and they’re all 5400RPM”. Some subset of machines, which happened to contain 5400RPM drives, would reliably crash.
Is that “AI” generated image?
Nope! It’s by a real artist, and actual intelligence, Joe Kim. He comes up with better stuff than we ever could.
Awesome every time and very recognizable. Always (well … since HAD) loved Joes artworks.
Gotta love the era where people are so obsessed over “AI slop” that they go after human artists because they can’t actually tell the “slop” from art.
To be fair, everyone is pushing “AI” and there’s no credits to Joe Kim…
Maybe we should… I wonder if there’s a good programmatic way to go back and label them all.
There should be, because we flag them with the Original Art tag. https://hackaday.com/category/curated/original-art/
Long timers recognize him.
Had a similar laugh the other day reading a Gen Z comment about a news item: “They gave it all away in the title!”
erm, that’s a headline not a title and news not clickbait. I guess i should be grateful they even noticed.
That’s ok, saw a ‘tuber called the stop motion animation in the latter half of coneheads ‘CGI’.
I had to sit down for a minute.
It doesn’t help that the article was at least initially “written” by generation. Many hallmarks are very clear. This undermines credibility, especially right now.
So you decide to respond to an wild (and proven wrong) accusation of AI use by making another wild accusation? Where’s your credibility?
And you’re just doing a variation on “This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time” anyway. Wasn’t valid then, isn’t valid now.
“initially written by generation”… You are wholly incorrect.
I bet you’re the kind of person that accuses people of generating posts with LLMs based on the presence of a single em dash
i’m always surprised spinning rust lasts as well as it does. i’ve never seen it show any environmental sensitivity, really. which is so surprising in isolation, but of course over 35 years of experiencing it, i’ve come to take it for granted and now i’m surprised that it can be susceptible to vibration
the funny part of this story in my mind is that it seems like the only reason anyone noticed it is that windows xp is churning the hdd even when the user is awol. there’s no moment in time where the hdd isn’t ram. lol.
Mechatronics is a fascinating field.
Nice detective work.
Circa 1987 IBM PC desktops with the 20 MB 5-1/4″ HDD sitting on a desk would crash if an adjacent filing cabinet drawer was closed a little too fast. Probably no resonance involved though.
To say that this story is suspect is to put it extremely mildly. This is supposed to be a phenomenon with a song from 1989, crashing laptops in early 2000, claimed in 2022, and resurfacing in 2025. Even Chen’s story seems to be from a secondhand source.
Nope.
Leaving aside the physical unlikelihood, the fact is simple: If this had really been happening, we ALL would have known about it, because kids would have been running around blasting Janet Jackson just to kill every laptop they could find. It would have been a famous incident. Instead, this sounds more like “let’s make an Internet meme and see who will believe it!”
Unless someone independent and trustworthy can reproduce it?
Go on, I’ll wait.
Soon history will be peppered with LLM hallucinations which have been laundered through the hands of humans who have small but apparently citation-worthy media sites.
I remember reports of a different song, this time from U2, that caused issues on some Acer Aspire One models.
You’re correct, there were reports, eg https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-26-8-9-inch-acer-aspire-one-said-to-have-hard-drive-flaw-distaste.html
Who said it killed every laptop?
Some engineer discovered by random chance some weird failure case that affected some machines they were responsible for, and a workaround was put in. That happens ALL THE TIME.
The exact song that caused it is irrelevant, and when there’s one song that does it, there will be plenty of others that also do it – Rhythm Nation just happens to be the one found to do it reliably by utter coincidence. Which is why the workaround was a simple notch filter for the specific frequency that was resonating, and not some dumb “detect Rhythm Nation and power down the HDD” thing.
Is the story imperfectly told? Sure, what story isn’t?
The most suspect part to me is the claim that laptop speakers from the early 2000s could accurately reproduce 87hz at all. Recent 16″ MacBook Pros, which have arguably the best performing speakers ever put into a laptop, still roll off hard below 100hz. Laptop speakers 25 years ago were almost universally terrible (particularly on the low end — usually extremely tinny).
I’m interested to see people attempt to reproduce this though.
What sounds most sus to me is that it claims the hard drives would produce corrupt data when vibrated. First, all hard disks have Error Detection and Correction (ECC) and would report reading errors and retry frantically. This can in no way crash an OS. Secondly, hard disks from mid-2000 onward contain an accelerometer or other form of shock detection, and park the heads. Only this could cause blue screens but not for the reason stated.
A computer shutting itself down when it has to play a Janet Jackson song? Sounds like a case of pure self-preservation to me.
Could someone please tell Douglas Hofstadter (GEB)? He should be delighted.
“I Cannot Be Played On Laptop X”
I wonder what Douglas Hofstadter would think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
He’s looking into it, but It’ll probably take longer than expected.
Western Digital or Seagate…. the hard drive industry had condensed by then; especially when it comes to laptop OEM parts.