from what you actually play · time of day · dwell · place · weather
Taste Profile
what you play, weighted by what you've made canon — the library census lives in STUDIO · NUMBERS
Taste Map
the canon, plotted by feel · mood on one axis, energy on the other — a fingerprint in pigment
drivingambientmelancholyeuphoric
dot color = head ◀▶ body (cerebral → groove) · size = density · hover a dot for the album
Across Time
the canon walked through the decades · genre keeps the colors honest
World of the Canon
a geography of listening · the records and the rooms they were cut in
My Fingerprint
the artists that keep recurring across every voice I trust · the brighter the amber, the more rooms nod along
The Charts
top tracks, top artists · through the lens of right now, six months back, all-time
4 WEEKS
6 MONTHS
ALL TIME
TOP TRACKS
— connect Spotify to load —
TOP ARTISTS
— connect Spotify to load —
Listening Times · Heatmap
when the room is loudest · day-of-week against hour-of-day, drawn from the last fifty plays
shaded by your last 50 plays · long-tail builds session-by-session via local telemetry
Canon · Cross-Reference
where the holy-100 meets the actual rotation · what stays warm, what gathers dust
RECENTLY TOUCHED · CANON
— connect Spotify —
DUSTY · NOT RECENTLY PLAYED
— connect Spotify —
The Shelf
what you played · your cut sides
Currently Spinning
the rotation, today · pulled from the desk
Hand-picked Sets
six sets, folded in by the author · names withheld
The Circle
independent voices, hand-folded in by the author · — shows, — tracks
The Vinyl Wall
one hundred records, no algorithm · — entries with the birth-year shelf
The Bench
catalogue tools · resolve & enrich · dev only
ZUBISSOU STUDIO
THIRD EDITION · ZS-003 · 2026
The problem. Finding the music you actually mean to listen to is work —
and it's hardest exactly when you can't do the work: driving, deep in a task, with
friends at the lake or the beach. The moments you least want to be on your phone.
The work. Six months of building the answer: a room that composes a
personalized soundtrack for each moment. Eleven thousand tracks feel-tagged by hand and
LLM. A scoring engine that reads mood, energy, weather, and the hour. A Journey mode
that plans an arc, not a queue. You stay present with the people you love or the work
in front of you — the music takes care of itself.
A passion project, built for friends and family. Trust the room.
Author
Zubair Jeewanjee — product, design, code. One author, end to end: the product
thinking, the interaction design, the data pipeline, every line.
~17,000 lines of hand-written vanilla JS, shipped as one deliberate artifact —
no framework, no build step, serverless edge functions where the product needs
them. No tracking, no ads. github · zubairjeewanjee-42 / zubissou-sounds
— questions about the features or the build, reach the author there.
Engine
Journey mode plans an arc, not a queue — sun-anchored phases flow from the energy of
now toward where the day is heading. Weather changes the texture, not just the
energy. A 48-hour cross-session memory keeps yesterday's trip from repeating; jitter
breaks ties so no track always leads. Stature gives named records a gentle thumb on
the scale while deep cuts sit back. And the intent bar reads plain language —
"rainy jazz", "3am" — or drops any track into a running Journey with a choice:
resume the arc, or re-plan from here.
Numbers
— canon albums · — playable tracks ·
— tracks indexed · — artist origins mapped (—) ·
— genre-tagged. Every track carries four feel knobs —
mood, energy, density, head·body, 0–100. Census runs continuously.
Stack
Vanilla JS · Chart.js · Fuse.js · Spotify Web API + Web Playback SDK via PKCE
OAuth · Cloudflare Pages, with an edge function proxying
Genius for song context.
Tempo, key & danceability by
GetSongBPM ·
artist origins by MusicBrainz · genres & art by Spotify.
The catalogue is feel-tagged by hand and LLM.
Canon
One hundred records, hand-picked, plus a birth-year shelf (1984) for context —
pre-1900s spirituals through 2020s ambient. Promotable, demotable, reorderable;
no algorithm decides who's in. Around the canon, a small circle of independent
voices — radio, mixtapes, music writing — folded into the room by the author.
Aesthetic
Inspired by the jazz kissas of Tokyo — shelves of vinyl, one serious system, a room
that exists for listening. Thirty-plus bars visited; the palette and geometry come
from the
top ten, mapped here. The hardware on screen is drawn from the author's own
studio: the Avalon pre-amp on the desk, the VU meters that never sit still.
Day mode is a gallery. Night mode is a lounge.
How It Works
Feedback
Feedbackteach the room · log what's off
Tell Zubair — it goes straight to him
Sent with: your name · track · screen · preset · device · any errors. Nothing to fill in.
Recent notes
Every tap teaches the room — one small prediction corrected. Taste isn't something you state; it's something you reveal, one affirmation at a time.
How It Worksthe learning loop, in plain terms
The room learns three ways: from the knobs you turn, from the taps you give a playing
track, and from what you promote. Underneath, it's balancing the one ratio your brain
already loves — enough familiarity to feel like home, enough novelty to keep the
dopamine of anticipation alive. The more you use it, the more it sounds like you.
01 · Steer the moment
1The Eight Knobsactive steering
Drag any knob to dial intent. Untouched knobs stay open — they don't
constrain the scoring. "Energy 75, era irrelevant" is a real instruction. Double-click
any knob to send it home; RESET returns all eight to AUTO. MUSE is the odd one out — dial it
toward an artist to deep-dive their discography.
2The Intent Bartype it
One field, two brains. Type a vibe — "rainy jazz", "3am" — and the
knobs dial themselves. Type a track or artist and pick from live results (yours, plus
marked Spotify picks) to play it next or add it to the cue. Drop one in mid-Radio and choose:
resume the arc, or re-plan the trip from here.
3Sourcepick one of five
RECORDS plays albums in order. SETS builds a
shuffled mix for the dialed vibe. BANGERS keeps one of every three a certified
hit. RADIO is the room driving — an evolving trip shaped by the hour, the
weather, and where your day is heading. PRESETS are curated recipes; tap one
and the knobs follow.
02 · Teach the room — taps on a playing track
4♥ Likesoft signal
Saves the track to your Spotify Liked Songs and feeds the Taste Profile —
the radar reshapes toward what you heart. A like is the lightest signal in the room:
no penalty, no pressure, just this one landed.
5+ Song · + Albumhard commit
Promotes the playing track or its album into the canon — the
hand-picked core every preset scores against. The canon can grow past a hundred; only top-10
flags demote lower entries.
6👍 · 👎recommender signal
More like this boosts the artist, genre, and era in future
SETS scoring — subtle but cumulative. Less like this skips now and suppresses
the artist for a while. Each tap is a prediction corrected — the same error signal your
brain uses to learn what it loves. Both survive reloads.
7🚩 Flag · ✕ Removecorrections
Flag means wrong for this preset — the track is
suppressed from that preset's future builds and logged with full context. Remove
is total: out of every pool, every search, everywhere.
03 · Watch it compound
Every play logs to the Shelf — where
you were, the hour, the weather, how long you stayed. That's not bookkeeping; it's how
musical memory actually works — the brain files a song with the room, the light, and the
people it arrived with. The Shelf just writes it down. Cut a Side presses your
last run to an acetate you can drop the needle on anytime. Insights turns the
log into the story of how you listen. Six months in, this room won't sound like anyone
else's — it'll sound like the sum of everything you've affirmed and skipped.
Your flags
— no flags yet —
The console doesn't push you toward what you'll click next.
It listens to what you've already affirmed, and offers more like that — quietly.
The Manuala field guide to the listening room · by Zubair Jeewanjee
Zubissou Sounds is a personalized listening room — built as the inverse of an algorithmic
feed. Where streaming services chase the next click, this room asks one quieter question:
what kind of moment is this? Eight knobs against nearly thirteen thousand
feel-tagged tracks, a canon of one hundred records at the core, a small circle of
independent voices hand-folded in by the author. The room reads the hour, the weather,
the season, whether it's a workday — and refuses, structurally, to recommend anything
you didn't already mean.
01 · Drive it
1The Consolesilent on arrival
Press PLAY and trust the Model, or dial the knobs first to override.
RECORDS · SETS · BANGERS sets how it plays — full albums in order,
shuffled mixes shaped by your dial, or certified hits one-in-three. JOURNEY is
the room driving: an evolving trip built from the hour, the live weather, workday or weekend,
and where your day is heading — no two days draw the same trip, and nothing repeats same-day.
PRESETS are curated recipes. RESET sends every knob home.
In SETS and JOURNEY the room also mixes harmonically when the data lines up —
same key, relative major/minor, or one step on the wheel (the Open Key on the
now-playing plate) — the DJ trick for seamless transitions, applied opportunistically.
2The Eight Knobsthe vocabulary
MOOD — melancholy ◀──▶ euphoric
ENERGY — ambient ◀──▶ driving; doubles as a live steer mid-Journey
FAM ◀▶ EXP — songs from your canon ◀──▶ songs you've never heard
ERA — pre-1970 ◀──▶ today; snaps to whole decades and landmark years (1969, 1991…)
DENSITY — sparse ◀──▶ wall of sound
HEAD ◀▶ BODY — cerebral / lyrical ◀──▶ physical / groove-driven
PLACE — ~22 musical regions (Brazil, Mali, Japan, UK…) and one secret planet
MUSE — off by default; dial it to an artist and the whole room scopes to their discography — RECORDS becomes their albums, SETS their catalogue shuffled, JOURNEY a trip drawn only from them
Drag up to increase, down to decrease. Double-click
returns a dial to AUTO (the model decides). Untouched knobs stay open to
interpretation — "energy 75, era irrelevant" is a real instruction. Turn a dial
mid-Journey and the rest of the trip re-draws to it. Knobs stack; in practice:
energy + groove up → The Rapture, Fela Kuti, Talking Heads · mood down + sparse
→ Eno, Satie, ambient Aphex · euphoric + body → Madonna, Prince, Chuck Berry ·
density maxed → My Bloody Valentine, Rite of Spring, Bitches Brew ·
PLACE → 🪐 → nothing but Sun Ra.
3The Intent Bartype it
Above the knobs. Type the soul of the moment — "Sunday morning rain",
"new contemporary Brazilian", "something I'd cook to" — and the knobs dial
themselves. Type a track or artist and pick from live results to play it next or add it to
the cue; drop one in mid-Journey and choose to resume the arc or re-plan from here.
02 · The room itself
4The Windowlive weather
The scene above the console follows the actual sky at your location. Rain
falls at the rate it's really raining (drizzle to thunderstorm). The lake carries
tonight's actual moon, terminator and all. The lamps follow the scene. The
meta line reads temperature, sky, UV and air quality —
the room knows whether it's a bright-and-open day before you do. Tap it to refresh; swipe
the window to change the view yourself (manual picks relax after a while).
5DAY / NIGHTthe bat-handle
The silver switch top-right. Down for DAY — gallery-white,
focus mode. Up for NIGHT — kissa lounge, amber lamps, tubes glowing. Same
room, different lighting. Defaults to night after 6pm.
6THE READOUTthe room's one voice
The amber glass between the player and the knobs. Everything the room has
to say lands here — green when something's done, pulsing amber when it needs you. Long lines
glide past like a wire-service ticker: hover to hold one, drag to
scrub it, tap the scanner light to replay recent messages, tap the
text to clear. It narrates your knob turns, acknowledges removals, explains itself when asked
— double-tap the now-playing card and it tells you exactly why this track,
now. It has a few moods of its own; certain records bring out its sentimental side.
03 · Teach it
7Taps on a playing trackthe learning loop
♥ saves to your Spotify likes — the lightest signal.
+ Song / + Album promotes into the canon, the hand-picked core every preset
scores against. 👍 / 👎 is a recommender correction — boosts or suppresses
the artist in context, cumulatively. 🚩 Flag means wrong for this
preset; ✕ Remove is total — out of every pool, every search, forever.
A skip is only ever "not now": the room dents that one context, never the artist
wholesale. Everything survives reloads.
8The circlereal humans
The room leans on people, not engines — a small circle of independent
shows and diggers folded into the catalogue as a private curator corpus, names withheld.
Push EXPLORE high and the Model draws from their shelves. There is no fallback to
an algorithm's recommendations, because there is no algorithm to fall back to — every track
in the room was let in on purpose.
04 · Live with it
9The instrumentssmall pleasures
Sleep fade — tap the nixie clock: 30 · 60 · 90 minutes;
the last five ramp the volume down gently, pause, and quietly restore it so the morning
isn't muted. Why this track — double-tap the now-playing card for the room's
reasoning: hour phase, weather, day context, feel-match. The Codex — tap any cover for
everything we know about the record.
10Shelf · Insights · Studiothe other rooms
Every play logs to the Shelf — the hour, the weather, how
long you stayed — and Cut a Side presses a run to an acetate you can drop
the needle on anytime. Insights turns the log into the story of how you
listen, down to a week-grid of your listening hours. Studio is the public
face — the essay, the canon wall, the colophon.
11Memorywhat it remembers
The room's taste-learning — affinity, rests, removals, your canon edits —
lives in this browser. Operators who find the hidden room can carry that memory between
machines as a single file, and should: years of training deserve a backup. (The door is a
year. The operator knows which one.)
12Put it on your phoneit's an app
Open the room in Safari or Chrome on your phone → Share →
Add to Home Screen. It installs with the amber-cone mark and launches
full-screen, no browser chrome — scene art cached for instant swipes, catalogue always fresh.
05 · Why this room exists
Music discovery is the quietly failing thing about streaming. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal — they know what you played last and serve you more of the same. Vector arithmetic. "People who liked X also liked Y." They never ask the only question that matters: what kind of moment is this for you?
The best curator I ever had was a friend hosting a party. Reading the room. Watching the weather through the window. Glancing at the hour on the wall. Pulling the next record from a deep shelf built over years. A sing-along after a long week. A slow burn after dinner. Something contemplative when the rain started. The right record. Never the algorithm's reflex.
That's the model this room runs on. The eight knobs are the parameters a real host holds in their head — mood, energy, density, the era they're reaching for, whether the room wants the body or the head, and where in the world it should sound like. The intent bar is plain English. The console scores a hand-built canon against what you said and what you dialed. You get the kind of moment you asked for, not the algorithm's best guess at your watch history.
Curation doesn't scale. That's the point. The streaming services scaled it and the music got worse — recommendation engines optimizing for completion rate, not for taste. This room is the inverse: small, slow, one person's taste end to end. Records have to earn their way past the door. There are fewer of them. They are better.
I built this because I don't have the time anymore to dig the way I used to, but the muscle memory of how a great host picks the next record is still in here. This room is that muscle memory, made operable. — Z.
Coda
"Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears. It is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more — it can provide access, even when no medication can,
to movement, to speech, to life itself. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity."
— Oliver Sacks · Musicophilia
Deviceswhich Spotify device should the room play through?
Don't see your phone or speaker? Open the Spotify app there, play any track for a second,
then come back here and tap REFRESH.
Manage Canonreorder, promote, demote · only the top 100 count
Presetsrecipes for the knobs · tap one to dial it in
Clone a Playlistpaste any Spotify playlist URL · save it to your library with your own name
Cloning copies the track list into a new private playlist in your Spotify account. The original stays untouched. Useful for grabbing Spotify-editorial playlists (which can disappear or change) and fixing them under your own name.