Janet Jackson's 1989 mega-hit "Rhythm Nation" sonically crushes old hard drives

"Brown Noise" is a legendary tone believed to cause people to lose control of their guts when subjected to its heartbreaking harmonic resonance. South Park did a whole thing on it. It turns out that the 5400 RPM hard drives in a number of older Windows-era laptops have their own brown note: the 1989 mega-hit "Rhythm Nation" by Janet Jackson. /p>

According to Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen, who told the story in a post on the Microsoft Developer Blog earlier this week, " a major computer manufacturer discovered "that playing the music video (above) would crash not only the hard drive of the laptop it was running on, but any other similar model within earshot.

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The Miter Corporation was not amused by this new vulnerability, giving it an entry in the CVE database. After further investigation, the device manufacturer confirmed that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies of hard drives playing the song, which essentially shook the devices. Rather than recall countless decades-old records, the manufacturer instead chose to develop a workaround by "adding a custom filter into the audio pipeline that detects and removes offending frequencies during audio playback," according to Chen.

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