Determine whether listener-specific context requires explicit modeling

Determine whether mood, situational intent, and personal listening history require an explicit listener-specific latent variable in the proposed Layer 1 representation, or can be treated as variation averaged out across the pooled listening corpus.

Background

Both the completed Song2Vec model and the proposed JEPA-style Layer 1 objective pool sessions across users. This pooling may erase context-dependent variation associated with individual listeners and listening situations. The paper explicitly leaves unresolved whether such variation must be represented as a dedicated latent factor.

References

Whether listener-specific context (mood, situational intent, personal listening history) requires an explicit latent variable at Layer 1, or can be treated as variation averaged out at corpus scale, is unresolved.

— Project Qualia: Recovering Experiential Music Structure from Session Co-occurrence Data  (2609.10862 - Mohammed et al., 9 Sep 2026) in Section 6.4, “Unresolved Design Parameters”