Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music (2007)

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79 pointslunaynx27 comments

This is an interesting choice. I feel like normally this sort of thing would manifest as a particular sequence of beeps, but those are hard to notice and easy to write off; "my computer plays Für Elise or It's A Small World on the beeper for no obvious reason" is very specific and much easier to hunt for.

But surely subjecting innocent people to "It's a Small World" without their permission is a felony in some jurisdictions, or should be.

It's probably a copyright violation, in which case you can expect the Disney cartel to pursue it more aggressively than the US government pursues felony charges.

You think the motherboard makers wouldn’t have licensed it?

It might've been a debugging feature that accidentally got shipped first with a copyrighted version, but then corrected to use some tune in the public domain.

They could update it via the firmware to, say, Never Gonna Give You Up.

You think they would have?

I don’t believe copyright violation is a felony, at least of one song; I was referring to the choice of melody.

Yup, definitely not a felony.

But I stand by my claim that Disney pursues copyright lawsuits harder than the government prosecutes some felonies.

Can a melody be copyrighted? I believe so, but changing just one note is enough to avoid it (see: Queen's Under Pressure vs Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby; the latter has one extra bass note)

Yup:

https://www.copyrightuser.org/create/creative-process/going-...

It's often hard to win melodic copyright violation suits, because IIRC you have to show intent to copy, not just they the melodies are similar.

I remember this in the ~2000 era. This was still a time when most viruses were fun or destructive. I assumed this one was a 'fun' one. Never until I read this did I realise my fan or PSU was on the way out.

Did playback cause the OS to freeze? It seems like it must because the BIOS would have to get back control of the CPU to do this and this would before Intel management engine.

Surely invoking an error message saying "CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance" would be more simple and more clear to the user. Anyone have any insights into the point of playing a song?

Depending on how the BIOS communicates to the speakers (or especially if what they mean by speaker is the beeper on the motherboard) doing it this "weird" musical way bypassing the OS might be much simpler.

It might not be able to even boot an OS if the CPU is getting cooked, so this might be the only way you know something is cuckoo.

Doesn't need to boot an OS to show any data, but it may need the CPU for that already, I don't know if a BIOS or whatever it's called these days has any processing capacity of its own nowadays.

Even if it does, I think CPU won't really run hard enough to generate any practical heat while in BIOS settings.

Older motherboards only had a buzzer which could play a tone at a given frequency. Mostly they just beeped but you could use them to play a crude song, if you were so inclined. In high school I wrote a VBA macro for Word which would do this - good times!

I’d guess someone was having fun and left in the wrong code. Usually the manual would explain the buzzer meanings, e.g 4 beeps is overheat, 3 is bad memory, etc. Nowadays there’s a proper speaker and an audible message.

As this is done at very low level, it is hard to make a routine that can write to the screen at any possible graphics mode, and without the OS knowing (i.e. the message could disappear as soon as it appears because it would have been overwritten). Given that there are no specific LEDs to indicate those kind of faults, they probably came out with this creative way of using the PC speaker (something rarely used by the OS/applications, reducing a lot the risk of interference). For clarification, this is the internal PC speaker controlled by one of the motherboard chipset timers. It can only play square waves. To play an audio message, custom additional hardware would be needed on the motherboard...

That assumes the user has a working display and that the BIOS can output anything to it. I mean usually this was the case, an audio signal (between 2 and 10 beeps if there was an issue, a single beep for no issues / POST success), and a visual output indicating the problem.

But a (working) display is not a given for any system, see e.g. servers.

Yet another example on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LQhf17i33g

At one point when I was a support tech one of our computers would randomly start playing sound, specifically radio stations. This would even happened if the computer was switched off however the external speakers had to be turned on for this to happen. We eventually attributed it to the user's proximity to the national broadcasters main tower (they were within 500m).

This only happened occasionally and not always the same radio station. She logged call after call about the problem just for us to travel to her location and tell her we could find nothing wrong while internally thinking that she might be hitting the bottle while at work :)

The phones at my mom's house play a local radio station. She can't hear it, and people can't hear it when they call, shrugs.

It was so creepy. Creepy Diamond Flower Motherboard. I thought it was a virus. Luckily hearing it play in the bios after reboot meant that it couldn't have been infection in the OS. New CPU cooler required!

And its friend, the Choco-Banana Shake Hang:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991006144116/http://support.mic...

Sounds like this: https://youtu.be/QrYK7eOE5R8

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