It's official.
Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation is a cyber security threat.
It apparently contains a frequency which breaks laptops...or at least it used to.
On his blog, windows developer Raymond Chen
recounted a time where a "major computer manufacturer"
(very specific there)
found that playing the song on one of their laptops would not only crash it,
but any other laptop that was sitting nearby.
Very strange!
It turns out that there was something in the recording of the song that matched the
natural resonant frequency of the specific 5400 rpm hard drives that the laptops used.
Play the song, the hard drive pulls a Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and fails.
This story spread like wildfire last week, because honestly, who could resist?
This song has a secret dark frequency...
which can break your computer!
NPR HOST: One song has so much power it can make some old laptops crash!
But honestly, the thing I'm amazed about is, that amid all of this hype nobody seemed interested in
discovering what the musical element was in Rhythm Nation that would cause the laptops to fail.
It just was presented as... "a frequency.
It has to do with the frequency in the song.
And honestly, the truth is just way cooler.
It's the bassline!
The bassline is the thing which caused those laptops hard drives to crash.
Yes, a bassline so sick, it is a cyber security threat!
To figure out why exactly, and how you too could
potentially use these ideas to break laptops if you so chose.
My god that actually works!
We have to talk a little bit about music theory,
a little bit about resonance and a little bit about music history.
Let's get into it y'all.
This video was brought to you by Curiosity Stream and my streaming service Nebula.
Part I - A brief musical analysis of Rhythm Nation
Rhythm Nation was written by Janet Jackson and the songwriting team
of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for her 1989 album Rhythm Nation 1814.
Now the tune is in E. The bass synth and the guitar hammer out that low E over
and over again in a one chord vamp that holds the whole tune together.
The parts are slightly different. The guitar riff sounds like this...
...the synth bass sounds like this...
...and the two of them together sound like this...
The vocal melody, at least for the verses anyway, is very syncopated - it's hitting a
lot of those 16th note off beats - and uses primarily notes from the minor.
This is characterized by the note G natural - the minor 3rd in the key of E.
...but interestingly the main hook of the tune -
"We are a part of the Rhythm Nation" - isn't in minor.
It instead uses notes from the major pentatonic,
including a C sharp and a G sharp - the major 3rd in the key of E.
Janet riffs on top of the hook, and when she does, she uses the minor 3rd - G natural.
This, in theory, shouldn't work, because you got G sharp and G natural happening at the same time.
But it DOES, because it's an example of blues harmony,
where minor 3rds and major 3rds interact in a very specific way to create a very specific sound.
Now blues, historically, is often associated with the key of E
- the key that Rhythm Nation is in - because E is the low string of the guitar.
Guitar was an important part of the early blues, and so a lot of blues
vocabulary that was developed is based on what feels good to play on this instrument.
Don't worry...
...this will relate back to laptops failing, I swear.
E is an important part of the blues...
...and blues harmony is an important part of funk grooves.
In the case of Rhythm Nation, the funk guitar riff in E as well as the syncopated melody
is likely a nod to the classic 70's funk tune by Sly and the Family Stone,
Thank You (Falletin Me Be Mice Elf Agin)
Now, because we keep hitting E over and over again - which is a staple of funk harmony - you might
think that this is the offending frequency which was causing the laptops to fail.
But there is something wrong here,
because any tune that is hammering on the low E string of the guitar should have caused this,
and because the blues is so popular, laptop hard drives should have been failing left and right.
Bedroom metal guitarists would be the real cyber security threat, not Janet Jackson.
So the question then becomes...
Why specifically...Rhythm Nation?
Part II - Mechanical Resonance
Hard drives in particular are susceptible to vibration,
like this video of a guy shouting at hard drives in a data center, and then crashing them.
Quality content, right there.
Raymond Chen's blog suggests that vibrations caused by exciting the natural resonant frequency
of these particular 5400 rpm hard drives was the thing that was causing the laptops to fail.
It's how singers can break wine glasses, for example.
They find the wine glasses natural frequency,
which is determined by some of the wine glasses physical characteristics,
sing that frequency, and then the wine glass vibrates itself into non-existence.
It's like pushing somebody on a swing. You have to push back at the right time - with
the correct FREQUENCY - and when you do, very little effort can send somebody quite far.
So what frequency failed those laptops?
Well it's difficult to know, because we don't know the exact hard drive that was being used,
and mechanical resonance is dependent on the physical characteristics of a given object.
In a video that he did on this story, Dave Plummer was able to replicate hard drive failures
with a resonant peak at 66 Hz, which is very cool!
But that would probably only work with that particular hard drive that he tested.
DAVE: Why 66 Hz, I don't rightly know.
...and 66 Hz is also roughly a C,
which doesn't make any sense, because Rhythm Nation is in E, not C.
I was able to find a paper on resonance in 2.5 mm laptop hard drives specifically, which suggests
a strong resonant peak at 87.5 Hz, which - when I found this - was very exciting. Why?
When we load a recording of Rhythm Nation into audacity and analyze it for resonant peaks,
we find a very similar frequency at 84 Hz, which just so happens to be the note E.
Which is obvious...because the tune is an E.
But if you export that audacity data, we find that the resonant peak is not 84 Hz precisely,
it's 84.2, which is a little bit higher than an equal tempered
E. It's not E exactly. What's going on here?
Now those of you with perfect pitch have probably been tearing your hair out this
whole video. Because Rhythm Nation is not tuned to A = 440. It's been tuned up about 40 cents
to roughly A = 450, if we're thinking about it that way. And that's the secret here.
Rhythm Nation is not really an E.
Part III - Varispeed
Orchestras in the 19th century were in an arms race. They found that by tuning slightly higher
than the orchestras from the next town over, they could play the same pieces of music,
but the music would sound more brilliant and more evocative and more intense.
Now, the standard pitch of the era had been set in 1859 by the French government
so that A would equal 435 hertz - the so-called Diapason Normal.
But this was often ignored, and orchestras kept tuning their A's higher and higher through a
phenomenon called Pitch Inflation A's could reach as high as 455 Hz.
Even today, orchestras in Europe tune a little bit higher than the standard pitch
of A = 440 Hz. Some orchestras tune to 442, 444, and beyond.
Music can sound more exciting more intense more alive if you
juice those tuning numbers ever so slightly.
In the 1970's, recording engineers started using a trick to get kind of
the same effect. Making music more exciting by increasing the pitch.
By taking the master recording of a song and using the varispeed function on a tape deck,
you could speed up a recording by a certain percentage usually 1-2%.
Not only would the music get faster, but the pitch would increase a little bit as well,
making the whole thing sound more intense.
This was often done on the radio single version of recordings to make
the radio singles stand out more.
You can really hear this effect on Gerry Rafferty's song Baker's Street.
Listen to how much more exciting and intense the single version is.
Which one would you rather listen to?
I know I would rather listen to the single version - it's more exciting,
because it's a little bit faster, and the pitch is a little bit higher.
If we slowed Rhythm Nation down, we in theory could match its pitch to A = 440,
and get a sense of what it originally sounded like, before it got that varispeed treatment.
It doesn't sound quite as exciting as the actual recording...
Yeah, that's much better for the dance vibe, right? Yeah!
Now what does this have to do with the laptops failing, and blues harmony.
Well, follow me here.
Blues is often in the key of E, because E is the low string of a guitar and
guitar was the most important instrument in the early blues.
Funk is a repetitive rhythmic genre that's
often based on blues harmony vamps, often in the key of E.
Funk in the 1970s had a generally more chill and relaxed vibe that
you can hear in Sly and the Family Stone's Thank You (Falletin Me Be Mice Elf Agin)
But just like the European orchestras had in the 19th century with their pitch inflation,
funk went through a similar thing.
By the 1980s it was expected that funk be more dancey and more hype,
and one way of getting this kind of feel is by slightly speeding up the recording of the master,
changing both the tempo and the pitch.
Rhythm nation was likely recorded at A = 440 and then sped up ever so slightly,
and when the tune was sped up to match that particular hyped dance feel of the 1980's,
the low E happened to match the natural resonant frequency of certain laptop hard drives.
Again, we don't know exactly what the hard drives were that
we're talking about, but chances are their resonant frequency was 84.2 Hz.
This is why Rhythm Nation, and only Rhythm Nation not any other tune, not any other funk tune in the
key of E is the cyber security threat, because rhythm nation was the one that was sped up.
I've been looking for other popular songs with similar resonant peaks as
Rhythm Nation that could have potentially triggered those laptop hard drive failures.
The closest I've found is Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls, which was recorded a bit sharp.
Loading it into audacity shows a similar 84 Hz peak.
You would think that because the blues is so popular, and guitar is so popular,
and that varispeed trick was used quite often, this would have been more of a
problem for laptop hard drives, but apparently it was just Rhythm Nation which caused this.
So to come up with a bass line so sick it breaks hard drives, you need to know the exact
natural resonant frequency of that model of hard drive - which I can't imagine
is an easy thing to look up - unless you're testing things out yourself.
In this case, maybe you could find a hard drive like Dave Plumber's,
and write a tune with some serious resonant peaks around 66 Hz. In that case, in theory,
you could write this mythical god-like baseline.
At the end of the blog post, Raymond Chen mentioned how this whole problem was solved.
"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, no more threat. Oh well.
Raymond continued...
"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're no longer using."
That's kind of a fun prospect to consider, right?
Maybe because of Rhythm Nation - 84.2 Hz, a slightly uptuned E,
has just been removed from all laptop audio from a "certain computer manufacturer"
I think the reason why this story is interesting for me,
and has resonated with me and apparently a lot of other people, is because it's a reminder
that music has a real physical impact not only on us but the world around us.
Music has real physical power, it is vibrations in space. [This story] is a tantalizing
intersection between technology and musical affect, and I think that's just really neat.
And so just like how Joshua blew the horns at the battle of Jericho causing the walls
to come tumbling down Janet Jackson's bassline on Rhythm Nation caused the walls of the laptop
to come tumbling down...you get you get the metaphor that I'm going for right? Okay.
Speaking of metaphors and other literary devices...
(how's this for a segue?)
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Thanks everybody so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video.
And until next time everybody - hope we don't break any laptops with this one...