Site icon No Talent for Certainty

Arbitrary Robots

On Sundays — like this last one — I provide music at the church my wife is minister of; I play the piano and the organ. The church is small, but when the pandemic hit, we started broadcasting services over Facebook Live in order to reach those unable to attend, under the account attached to my actual (non-pseudonym) name, using the incredibly high-tech setup of my phone attached to a tripod.

This last Sunday, I turned on the phone halfway through the service (as we do), and went back into the choir loft to play the music before the sermon. Afterwards, as the sermon began, people at home let other congregants know that the broadcast had stopped; I went back downstairs and restarted it. After the service, I looked to see what had happened.

I had gotten a notice from Warner Media that I had used a recording of theirs so they were stopping the broadcast. THEY THOUGHT ME PLAYING LIVE WAS A RECORDING. Their robot/algorithm for detecting uses of their recordings is obviously very flawed, because no classical recording of the piece I played has as many mistakes as I routinely make.

I went back to church in the afternoon and re-recorded the piece, with my usual glorious assortment of missed notes:

Really, Warner Media?

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