Janet Jackson, the sister of the late Michael Jackson, and the youngest in the Jackson family, is a famous American singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer.
Noted for her innovative, socially conscious and sexually provocative records, as well as elaborate stage shows, Janet is also famous for her mezzo-soprano vocal range.
While her vocal capabilities are often compared to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, Janet is unique on her own, as she is able to make use a tremendous amount of air she inhale to then exhale, to empower her voice.
Some suggest that this makes Janet's vocal capabilities stronger than her peers in terms of force, despite sitting below the soprano vocal range.
And this is proven by her 1989 dance-pop song "Rhythm Nation," that is capable of destroying computers.
This fact was revealed by long-time Windows developer Raymond Chen in a blog post he posted on Microsoft's website.
Chen said that his colleague, who tested a major computer manufacturer's laptop computer, discovered that playing Janet's Rhythm Nation video would crash certain models of laptops, even those of their competitors.
"One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops," Chen explained. "I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement."
Chen described an instance where a laptop near the one playing the video crashed.
In more specific, the issue doesn't come from the music video, but the song itself.
The Rhythm Nation song was able to reach a certain frequency that within it, the sound wave can cause laptops' hard drives to vibrate to the point of failure.
"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," Chen explained.
Natural frequency, also known as eigenfrequency, is the frequency at which a system tends to oscillate in the absence of any driving or damping force.
In other words, the hard drives, which have their own natural frequency, vibrate at certain part of Janet's song.
This phenomenon is known as the acoustic resonance.
This happens when a sound source amplifies the sound waves whose frequency matches one of its own natural frequencies of vibration.
Like mechanical resonance, acoustic resonance can result in catastrophic failure of the vibrator.
The classic example of this is breaking a wine glass with sound at the precise resonant frequency of the glass.
A glass has a natural resonance, a frequency at which the glass can vibrate.
When that happens, with enough force, the glass that responds to the acoustic resonance will vibrate strong enough that it can shatter.
In this case, it's the hard drives that respond naturally to Janet's song.
It's the frequencies in Rhythm Nation that amplify the natural frequency of the hard drives, breaking the hard drives.
It's worth noting that the issue only affects certain laptops, and certain models. It also affect only hard disk drives (HDD) and not solid-state drives (SSD).
Since manufacturers won't recall untold numbers of old computers, manufacturer suggest that users add "a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback," according to Chen.
The Mitre Corporation has issued an entry for this unique computer vulnerability.
The vulnerability is described as allowing "physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (device malfunction and system crash) via a resonant-frequency attack with the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video."
Following Chen's revelation, more people started viewing the video, listening to the song, and populating the comment section.