I come from a small town called Changshu, a place so small that a Sunday afternoon walk through its streets almost guarantees running into a friend, a neighbour, or someone who has known your family for years. The town carries its own rhythm: narrow lanes, serene canals, a simple lifestyle, and an increasingly obsolete dialect.
Changshuese–a dialect of Wu–was the language of my childhood. It sounded nothing like the Mandarin taught at school. To me, it was the language of my grandparents calling beside the firewood stoves before dinner, of street vendors outside my school gate chattering across stalls, of the elderly in the neighbourhood gathering under a shed on a hot summer morning. Being one of only two kids in my class at school who spoke this mother tongue, I became aware of the memory, identity, and sense of belonging that it carried. Whenever I spoke Changshuese, I felt as if I was carrying a small piece of history within me.
When my family moved to Greece, language reshaped my life once again. The sounds of Greek felt like Morse code, impossible to decipher. Determined to experience the rhythm of Greek life to its fullest, whether it’s φιλοσοφία, φιλοκαλία, or φιλοξενία, I learned the Greek language, just as I had learned English before it and later Spanish. Each language opened a new door into a different culture, a different humour, a different way of sharing ideas.
Music, then, is my sixth language. A unique one. It is the medium through which I could express what words often could not. Sitting at the piano, I felt that the melodies flowing out of my fingers spoke with a clarity beyond grammar. Playing, jamming, and composing became the way I channelled my emotions, relaxed after a day of work, and contemplated with my fleeting nighttime thoughts. Singing and performing in different languages, music brought me all kinds of serendipity: connecting with tourists while busking at the beach, meeting two Italian friends at the airport piano with whom I’m still in touch, and making my classmates tear up at the school concert… Music has been the language through which I bond with people, building bridges with others in ways conversations could not.
Three years ago, language was conquered by machine intelligence. Wittgenstein's notion, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world", was perfectly exemplified. Soon after, AI music became a reality. I remember playing around with Suno V1 in 2023. Then, it could only generate a few dozen seconds of fragmented sound. Yet, as music is a universal "language", I was convinced that as computing power continues to grow, machines would be composing symphonies in no time.
Just two years later, over half of the musicians present at the Athens Music Technology Forum could not distinguish between AI and human-made music when I put the audience to the test. Nevertheless, when I prompted Suno V5, "Fugue in E minor, Bach style", it still failed at the rigorous rules of counterpoint. But this should be of no surprise: today’s generative AI is merely a probability-based system, still far from capturing the true meaning of music, and its significance as a "language" beyond sound. What will it take to enable machines to "possess" a soul – one that treats music just as another form of emotional expression, another language, another way of understanding and connecting with the world? The answer does not seem so clear, but it almost asks the same question that every AI researcher is grappling with: how can a machine be conscious of its behaviour? And if it did, then what?
Standing on the balcony, gazing at the Athenian night sky, I felt a Sisyphean sense of absurdity. If one day, AI truly understands Bach’s counterpoint, then where will the frontier between humanity and machines stand? Since I cannot predict where this boulder will ultimately roll, I choose to press my hands against it, feel its crushing weight, and in every exhausting push, understand what it means to exist, as a human.