Pixies apologise for turning off alarms

completemusicupdate.com:

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.