Recovering Expert Critic-Sourced Network Adjacency between Musical Artists from Acoustic Distributions: A Construct-Validity Approach

Abstract

Music recommendation relies primarily on two signals: user-item interactions, which fail in the cold-start regime, and intrinsic musical content, available for any recording. We argue that a third, largely untapped signal is both richer and more principled: critical adjacency, the pairwise relation established when an expert critic explicitly links two artists in long-form prose. It encodes deliberate judgments about which artists belong together. Prior work established its internal validity, showing it recovers coherent, interpretable communities and can match collaborative filtering in user-satisfaction simulations, with no user data. What has been missing is external validation: whether this critic-sourced relation is grounded in the music itself versus sociological context. We test it against acoustic content, reframing the question as one of construct validity. Representing artists as empirical distributions over 80 low-level Essentia acoustic descriptors and modeling pairwise proximity via marginal optimal-transport (Wasserstein) distances, we evaluate how far critical adjacency is sonically recoverable under a cold-start, artist-disjoint split. Our ensemble recovers these edges at out-of-sample AUC of 0.767 (95% CI 0.761-0.775). Recoverability rises monotonically with critical consensus, reaching 0.865 on multi-source attested edges. Stratified evaluations align with sociological models of genre: tightly bounded, scene-based genres show higher recoverability than broad industry umbrella terms. Critical discourse is thus a rich source of information for recommendation, decomposing into a reproducible "sonic core" and a "sociological remainder" driven by narrative positioning, subcultural context, and canonical placement. The work offers both a scalable cold-start discovery mechanism and a sociologically grounded approach to MIR and MRS research.