In a bizarre quirk of computer technology, Janet Jackson’s classic “Rhythm Nation” video was once found to crash certain laptops, even if the sound was playing from another source. The video derives its lethal force from a frequency (that is, roughly speaking, the speed of an audio vibration) that aligns perilously closely with the natural resonant frequency of certain laptop hard drives. The mind-boggling phenomenon, known as vibration resonance, has long wrought technological havoc with structures great and small, notably in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in 1940.
Technicians solved the mystery (apparently some time ago) during an investigation reported last week in a blogged anecdote by Microsoft’s chief software engineer, Raymond Chen, picked up by The Next Web. The fix for the affected, 5,400-rpm hard drives, Chen wrote, was to add a “custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.” Pitchfork has emailed Microsoft for more information.
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