The Rise of the Machines

 

Alexa is no friend of mine. And, though Siri sometimes asks how she can help when I've accidentally pressed something, I never speak to her, or to Google for that matter. The only thing we use the wi-fi for, apart from the laptops and phones, is music. I don't want remote-controlled, voice-activated curtains, ovens or vibrating eggs. I've seen too many episodes of Black Mirror to go down that tunnel thank you very much.

Around 8 years ago I steeled myself and purchased a music system called HEOS: speakers in 4 rooms connected to an external hard drive with the system controlled by an app. I painstakingly ripped all of our CDs and acquired a good selection of digital Grateful Dead concert recordings. You can send a signal to the speakers from a variety of internet sources as well as the hard drive or local device such as an iPod, so it's used for radio and playlists as well as CDs. It's worked well (within the limits of the router, anyway)

But on Saturday morning I came down for breakfast to the sound of unsolicited music playing in the kitchen...

There's no way it could have been left playing last night and I didn't even recognise the music! It certainly wasn't a continuation of what it was playing yesterday.

A quick look at the app showed that the sound was coming from Spotify. Now I've used Spotify on my laptop to check out specific artists and songs, but don't have a subscription and have never used it through any of the HEOS speakers. Oddly enough it was quite interesting music so I left it on while getting breakfast ready. But why was it playing? For how long? Has a neighbour activated our speaker? A hacker in Riga? Skynet? Or is the HEOS system discovering free will?

Well I was happy not to worry too much; it's simple to switch the thing off.

But Sunday morning the same thing happened! And today I was up in the bathroom brushing teeth and C called up to me "It's playing again!". Arana Grande! Loud too. (Well the Newcastle City Hall, 11/4/72, gig I played while making risotto yesterday had needed a bit of volume.)

That was the last straw. I've deleted Spotify from the long list of sources in the HEOS app. And await further developments. The phenomenon is limited to the speaker in the kitchen so far, so perhaps it's just one unit that's gone rogue, and the outbreak can be contained...

Or - is this what poltergeists get up to nowadays?