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Pixies apologise for turning off alarms

By | Published on Friday 5 May 2023

Pixies

Pixies have apologised for causing people – well, at least one person – to oversleep. It turns out that Black Francis saying the word “stop” at the start of the band’s song ‘Where Is My Mind?’ has been causing devices – or at least one device – to switch off any alarms.

The issue was raised by a Reddit user earlier this week, who reported on a problem that has been occurring on the device they use for their alarm ever since a recent update to Google Assistant, which allowed users to say “stop” in order to turn off their alarms when they wake up.

“For the past few months, I could not figure out why on random days, with seemingly no reason, sometimes my alarm would either not go off or turn itself off very quickly”, wrote the Reddit user. “Maybe once every other week or so, I would wake up 30 minutes later on my backup alarm, with no indication as to why the first shut itself off. Well, this morning, I woke up about five minutes before my alarm went off and I have cracked the code”.

“The alarm is set to play a Spotify playlist and one of the songs on that playlist is ‘Where Is My Mind?’ by the Pixies … The first line in the song is ‘Ooohhh STOP’, with the word ‘stop’ said very clearly. My [device] has been hearing that ‘stop’ and turning the alarm off. Since it’s a playlist on shuffle, it only comes up every once in a while, so it’s not happening every morning”.

Conducting some quick research, Android Police found that this phenomenon does not work with other songs that feature “stop” in their lyrics. It’s seemingly down to the fact that the word in the Pixies song is spoken, rather than sung, and appears before the track properly starts, so has no musical backing. The device starting the alarm simply hears someone saying “stop” and does as it believes it’s being asked.

It’s very effective, as you can see here:



Posting a link to the Android Police article on Twitter, Pixies said: “Sorry about that!”

Pixies are not the first act to have a song that plays havoc with technology. Last year, Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen revealed that, back in the early 2000s, certain laptops would crash when playing the video for Janet Jackson’s 1989 single ‘Rhythm Nation’.

The issue, it turned out, was the model of hard drive being used in some laptops at the time. By coincidence, Chen explained, the song contained “one of the natural resonant frequencies” for that model of hard drive, making it vibrate and temporarily stop working.



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