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Project Qualia: Recovering Experiential Music Structure from Session Co-occurrence Data

quality89

Updated 6 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FQ8C7FKQR7DEY0VF34WC

Published: 11 Sept 2026; T1 · 6 h ago
arXiv: 2609.10862; T1 · 6 h ago
Category: cs.SD; T1 · 6 h ago

Abstract

This report presents results from Project Qualia, an ongoing effort to determine whether experiential similarity between songs, a structure not captured by genre or metadata taxonomies, can be recovered from real listening behavior. We constructed a large-scale dataset of listening sessions, comprising 1.29 billion scrobbles collected from 9,396 users via the Last.fm API and reduced through a preprocessing pipeline to 531.6 million training scrobbles across 28.6 million sessions. On this corpus, we trained a skip-gram Word2Vec model (Song2Vec), treating each session as a sentence and each track as a token. As anticipated, the resulting embedding space was dominated by artist identity, a consequence of single-artist runs within sessions. To test for a subtler, artist-independent signal, we developed an artist-residual procedure: subtracting each artist's centroid from its tracks' embeddings and evaluating whether the remainder retained structure. Mean cross-artist cosine similarity fell from 0.2487 in raw embedding space to 0.0005 in residual space, yet 4,577 cross-artist track pairs retained cosine similarity $\ge 0.70$ in residual space, forming coherent genre- and era-based clusters, including trip-hop, 1990s grunge, 2020 mainstream pop, and cross-composer classical piano pairs at cosine similarity up to 0.95. These results confirm that the training data contains experiential structure independent of artist identity, establishing an empirical basis for an architecture designed to learn this experiential layer directly.

Authors 3

Nizam Mohammed, Abu B. S. Rahman, Dimuthu D. K. Arachchige

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10862
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10862
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Categories: cs.SD, cs.IR, cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10862
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.SD
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

6 h ago

Conflicts

None

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Claim history

9 claims · 9 properties

Official pageofficial_url1

Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10862	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Abstractabstract1

Claim history for Abstract
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
This report presents results from Project Qualia, an ongoing effort to determine whether experiential similarity between songs, a structure not captured by genre or metadata taxonomies, can be recovered from real listening behavior. We constructed a large-scale dataset of listening sessions, comprising 1.29 billion scrobbles collected from 9,396 users via the Last.fm API and reduced through a preprocessing pipeline to 531.6 million training scrobbles across 28.6 million sessions. On this corpus, we trained a skip-gram Word2Vec model (Song2Vec), treating each session as a sentence and each track as a token. As anticipated, the resulting embedding space was dominated by artist identity, a consequence of single-artist runs within sessions. To test for a subtler, artist-independent signal, we developed an artist-residual procedure: subtracting each artist's centroid from its tracks' embeddings and evaluating whether the remainder retained structure. Mean cross-artist cosine similarity fell from 0.2487 in raw embedding space to 0.0005 in residual space, yet 4,577 cross-artist track pairs retained cosine similarity $\ge 0.70$ in residual space, forming coherent genre- and era-based clusters, including trip-hop, 1990s grunge, 2020 mainstream pop, and cross-composer classical piano pairs at cosine similarity up to 0.95. These results confirm that the training data contains experiential structure independent of artist identity, establishing an empirical basis for an architecture designed to learn this experiential layer directly.	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Arxiv announce typearxiv_announce_type1

Claim history for Arxiv announce type
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cross	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

arXiv idarxiv_id1

Claim history for arXiv id
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
2609.10862	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Authorsauthors1

Claim history for Authors
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Nizam Mohammed, Abu B. S. Rahman, Dimuthu D. K. Arachchige	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Categoriescategories1

Claim history for Categories
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.SD, cs.IR, cs.LG	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

PDFpdf_url1

Claim history for PDF
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10862	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Primary categoryprimary_category1

Claim history for Primary category
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.SD	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Publishedpublished_at1

Claim history for Published
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
11 Sept 2026	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	5 h ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.