Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation & the ability of resonant frequencies in music to alter physical objects

[auxien]

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing (microsoft.com)

Quote

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.

so, a few things here:

• first of all the song is decent, but she's got better ones imo. 
• of note is that Chen specifically mentions the music video causing the resonant frequency, not the song in general....and i assume there's only those first ~30 seconds of video before the song properly starts. should be easy enough to narrow down the candidates.
• all sorts of frequencies are in audio/music we hear all the time. why would this particular instance of one particular frequency cause an issue? the volume of this frequency as well as the frequency itself? would just slowly sweeping some resonant sounds through a huge range of frequencies eventually crash all hard drives? SO MANY QUESTIONS
• the computer manufacturers were filtering all audio in certain laptops/desktops? just because of this one glitch? that seems kinda odd....was it just filtered out of the computer speakers? other nearby laptops would 'hear' this sound and also crash if with that particular hard drive, so was it the combo of certain laptop speakers + the hard drive? what if you blasted the music video out of a big set of stereo speakers?

okay i'll shut up now.

(edit: almost. yes, all music/vibrations alter physical objects to some degree or another, that's how our ears work, but i'm slightly joking with the long annoying & pretentious title)

Edited August 18, 2022 by auxien

[prdctvsm]

 

[Squee]

7 hours ago, auxien said:

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing (microsoft.com)

so, a few things here:

• first of all the song is decent, but she's got better ones imo. 
• of note is that Chen specifically mentions the music video causing the resonant frequency, not the song in general....and i assume there's only those first ~30 seconds of video before the song properly starts. should be easy enough to narrow down the candidates.
• all sorts of frequencies are in audio/music we hear all the time. why would this particular instance of one particular frequency cause an issue? the volume of this frequency as well as the frequency itself? would just slowly sweeping some resonant sounds through a huge range of frequencies eventually crash all hard drives? SO MANY QUESTIONS
• the computer manufacturers were filtering all audio in certain laptops/desktops? just because of this one glitch? that seems kinda odd....was it just filtered out of the computer speakers? other nearby laptops would 'hear' this sound and also crash if with that particular hard drive, so was it the combo of certain laptop speakers + the hard drive? what if you blasted the music video out of a big set of stereo speakers?

okay i'll shut up now.

(edit: almost. yes, all music/vibrations alter physical objects to some degree or another, that's how our ears work, but i'm slightly joking with the long annoying & pretentious title)

That sounds like proper bullshit if you ask me.
I just recorded the first 50 secs of the audio from the video and nothing stands out.

[Scaramouche]

7 minutes ago, Squee said:

That sounds like proper bullshit if you ask me.
I just recorded the first 50 secs of the audio from the video and nothing stands out.

You can listen to Janet, but you can’t hear Janet

[auxien]

4 hours ago, Squee said:

That sounds like proper bullshit if you ask me.
I just recorded the first 50 secs of the audio from the video and nothing stands out.

there’s a couple of comments on the blog post and i believe one or two on the Twitter thread of similar-ish stories from others…and besides, i would assume this Microsoft dude on an official Microsoft account wouldn’t be just slinging out unfounded bs…but i’m way not smart enough with that shit to know, hoping some smarter people here (ha!) might have some insight

10 hours ago, prdctvsm said:

 

i still have that CD but probably haven’t listened to it since like 2004 or something 

[Taupe Beats]

12 hours ago, auxien said:

• the computer manufacturers were filtering all audio in certain laptops/desktops? just because of this one glitch? that seems kinda odd....was it just filtered out of the computer speakers? other nearby laptops would 'hear' this sound and also crash if with that particular hard drive, so was it the combo of certain laptop speakers + the hard drive? what if you blasted the music video out of a big set of stereo speakers?

Don't see why it's that odd. It's the same as someone finding a glitch in software after beta testing's ended. Just an obscure and unexpected but still consequential fault in technology. The filter wasn't added just for that song, but for that potential frequency that could show up in another recording.

The Rhythm Nation tour looked fucking awesome. I am trying to find the video now and of course failing but the percussionist on stage had an entire room full of stuff.

 

[Squee]

20 minutes ago, auxien said:

there’s a couple of comments on the blog post and i believe one or two on the Twitter thread of similar-ish stories from others…and besides, i would assume this Microsoft dude on an official Microsoft account wouldn’t be just slinging out unfounded bs…but i’m way not smart enough with that shit to know, hoping some smarter people here (ha!) might have some insight

i still have that CD but probably haven’t listened to it since like 2004 or something 

Totally.
And maybe I'm misunderstanding something here... but he's saying that a resonant frequency in the audio in music video would cause some laptops to freak out? So in theory, if someone did a sine wave sweep from 20-20000hz on one of those laptops it would stop working?

Also, the speakers on those laptops can't have been very good, so it certainly couldn't be a low end frequency causing this.

Looking at the spectrogram of the intro here and nothing really sticks out?

[auxien]

27 minutes ago, Squee said:

he's saying that a resonant frequency in the audio in music video would cause some laptops to freak out?

yes, by way of the hard drives in those laptops:

Quote

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm

….but why a song playing the same frequency would cause a hard drive to crash is beyond me. 

i wondered about the sine wave sweep thing too up there originally…none of this is really making sense to me. trying to understand!

[auxien]

39 minutes ago, Taupe Beats said:

Don't see why it's that odd. It's the same as someone finding a glitch in software after beta testing's ended. Just an obscure and unexpected but still consequential fault in technology. The filter wasn't added just for that song, but for that potential frequency that could show up in another recording.

right, but the laptop manufacturer filtering all audio on a consumer device in that way is what’s weird. what if the laptop owner was into experimental music and played some song that was literally just a tone at that frequency? would the laptop play just silence? 

[Taupe Beats]

15 minutes ago, auxien said:

right, but the laptop manufacturer filtering all audio on a consumer device in that way is what’s weird. what if the laptop owner was into experimental music and played some song that was literally just a tone at that frequency? would the laptop play just silence? 

I may be misunderstanding, but I thought this was done due to the frequency crashing the hard drive itself. So in the hypothetical you describe, it would be silence, but if the filter wasn't applied, the listener wouldn't hear the recording anyway because the drive would crash upon starting playback. 

The question I have is how difficult it would have been to re-engineer the drives so the frequency wouldn't crash it. As well, I suspect a lot of drives were manufactured before this problem was discovered so the filter solution was seen as the most affordable.

[ArtificialDisco]

He isn't very heavy on technical detail but maybe it's the frequency response in the actual speaker in combination with the resonance in the hard drive. If that were the case then it isn't a huge deal to filter some unwanted frequency on a laptop speaker that's kind of crap anyway... (I'm just speculating now). And maybe Janet just happened to hit this frequency so squarely and for so long in this particular song that it produced the effect. I'm also guessing that they didn't test all that many other songs, but the potential of there being thousands of them out there is a scary thought.

I'm also guessing that doing a sine sweep would produce the crash as well.. probably how they actually found the offending frequency. And as Taupe Beats mentioned, it's cheaper and quicker to do a software update than to contact the hard drive manufacturer to fix it, wait months for them to actually do it, then recall possibly thousands of laptops after replacing the faulty drives.

And of course Raymond Chen is not an audio engineer and is just relaying the story as he remembers. One thing that stick out a little for me that might be an embellishment after passing the story around too often:

Quote

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!

If this is true, then any speaker playing that frequency loud enough would also crash the drive. You can't put a filter on the world! If it was laptop speaker buzzing internally, then it's much easier to understand. But then it wouldn't crash other computers, right? Right?

Edited August 19, 2022 by ArtificialDisco
can changed to can't

[prdctvsm]

8 hours ago, auxien said:

i still have that CD but probably haven’t listened to it since like 2004 or something 

fantastic album imo, mbe time 2 bung yr cd inna cd player & crank dat stez aux !  

[TubularCorporation]

I assume the filtering they're talking about is doen acoustically, not on the software level (maybe in firmware?).  It would be straightforward to change the case design so that the specific frequency in question was cancelled before it reached the hard drive.  That's the same way ported speakers and directional microphones work.  No reason something similar couldn't be done with the laptop case. There's already a lot of acoustic engineering that goes in to making laptop speakers even vaguely listenable, much less halfway pleasant.

 

EDIT: on the other hand, the onboard interface on my last laptop was completely useless for headphone listening unless I used ASIO4ALL because the official driver left the EQ curve that it applied to make the built in speakers sound OK on even when the headphones were connected.  If you switched from the official driver to ASIO4ALL there was a REALLY obvious mid scoop and highpass with the official one, and before I figured it out it used to make me nuts when I did headphone checks of my own mixes on it.  So I wouldn't put it past them to jsut have an always-on notch filter at the driver level.

Edited August 18, 2022 by TubularCorporation

[TubularCorporation]

This reminds me of a few years ago when they demonstrated a proof-of-concept virus that could jump between computers acoustically.

[cruising for burgers]

richard already been there, did that...

 

oh and:

Edited August 19, 2022 by cruising for burgers

[auxien]

11 hours ago, ArtificialDisco said:

maybe it's the frequency response in the actual speaker in combination with the resonance in the hard drive

yeah, that seems to make intuitive sense to me, but i'm not sure i could quantify exactly why that feels right.

11 hours ago, ArtificialDisco said:

maybe Janet just happened to hit this frequency so squarely and for so long in this particular song that it produced the effect.

this too...the frequency has to happen in other audio/songs, but the offending frequency at the (approximate) right volume and length makes sense. especially if it was the right freq at right volume and right length when emphasized/resonated through the laptop speakers all created a perfect storm? just speculating like you mostly, but this seems right...ish.

11 hours ago, ArtificialDisco said:

If it was laptop speaker buzzing internally, then it's much easier to understand.

agreed!

3 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:

not on the software level (maybe in firmware?).

it was done via software: "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."

plus he even jokes about it 'still being around' basically: "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.)" ....who knows how many of us have been missing that frequency in music for over a decade perhaps. class action lawsuit incoming

3 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:

This reminds me of a few years ago when they demonstrated a proof-of-concept virus that could jump between computers acoustically.

that is interesting. i was hoping this thread might bring some stuff like that up for discussion as well.

[prdctvsm]

  T.A.G.C. – Meontological Research Recordings Teste Tones  

 

 

[TubularCorporation]

9 hours ago, auxien said:

it was done via software: "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."

Maybe this is the real reason that laptop I had sounded like crap.

[auxien]

related, via the Ars write up on this.

they mention that the 'song' but not specifically the video was the offendor...still a little confusion as to that, i've seen both cited around. 

[TubularCorporation]

  

 

 

I have no idea, so don't ask. I guess it's important to have a hobby.

[zero]

it's all entirely possible certain frequencies hidden away in unknown corners of sine waves appearing in the Janet Jackson song are the culprit here.

OR this guy travelled in through a 6th dimensionary wormhole at the exact same time all the laptops frizzle fried, then left completely unnoticed by the human eye -  

[Taupe Beats]

Some random person at a rave back in 1999 once gave me a detailed explanation on how to turn an old hard drive disc into a gong. It was fascinating but I was way too high to retain any of the information. But the concept of an old hard drive disc as a gong stuck with me. Anyone know anything about this? I have never seen any info online to support this claim.

[TubularCorporation]

I assume you just take the platter out and hang it from a string, but it would be a realyl high pitched gong.  I've got a little stack of platters from older (late 90s/early 00s) hard drives, because the bearings in a single-platter 5.25" hard drive are really useful for repairing fretted instruments - the bearing is really high quality and the platter thickness is jsut slightly wider than the tang on standard fret wire, so all you have to do is stick it to a board with a couple nylon rollers on either side and you have a really nice fretwire bender for a LOT less than buying a commercial one.

 

Bearing is so mooth you don't need a crank or anything, you can just feed the wire through easily with your hand.  The nylon bushings are smooth enough that they don't need torotate, the wire gides roght over them and there's no danger of denting or scratching it. Total cost was around $3, not counting the clamp.

 

The original plan was to eventually make a fancy aluminum backplate with adjustable bearing rollers like the commercial one, but it ended up being totally unnecessary.  

 

The first one I made didn't even have a board or anything, I just took the platter out of an old drive, drilled some holes in the sides and rounced them off so the wire would feed through the holes over the bearing and you could use different holes to get diferent radiuses, and even that worked fine.  

 

 

 

Never throw out a hard drive if you can avoid it!

[Taupe Beats]

I should mention, he was specifically referring to HD discs that would be in old server rooms. I remember he said the size was around that of a 12" record. It would probably still be high pitched but he kept going on that the tone was nice. But yes, I remember he mentioned drilling the disc and hanging by string.

[TubularCorporation]

Oh, that makes sense.  They had a couple of those giant, 70s hard drives in a storage closet when I was in college. They're the kind you had to keep perfectly level because the platters actually floated on a cusion of air or something while they were spinning (or maybe it was the head that floated, I forget), so even a little tilt would make them self destruct. I bet they couldn't even handle hearing Tito Jackson.

Edited August 19, 2022 by TubularCorporation