I think we are using qualia to refer to different things. I am using it to mean something more specific than just a subjective sensory experience; I'm referring to incommunicable ,"extra" experience (i.e., there is no way to tell if we see the same "color" when we look at a red apple, even though we are both seeing the same frequency of light. For all I know, you experience what I would call blue). Sorry if my definition wasn't clear; is there another, more specific word for this aspect of qualia?

The difference between phoneme comprehension in different languages does not appear to reference this definition of qualia. I experience the phoneme "p", and though I am mentally assigning it to a bucket that other languages would split further into an aspirated "p" and unaspirated "p", there's no special "p-ness" about that sound that distinguishes it from other phonemes in some ineffable way. It's just frequencies, completely unlike colors which have metadata.

When you learn to hear "the one" note that begins a tact, does it sound fundamentally different from other sounds, or does it just feel different, even though the sound itself is qualitatively like all others? I would consider it to be an ineffable qualia iff that sound were as different from the same sound in a another context as red is from blue.

When I am playing piano, the upbeats and downbeats, or the beginning of a phrase, feel different to me, likely in the same way that the note that begins a tact feels different to you (I presume). But I wouldn't say the upbeats and downbeats are different qualia; they only feel that way to me because I'm anticipating them and treating them differently. They don't have any different qualities from each other.

But again, that's probably just me. I think the main reason I'm interested in reverse engineering minds is so we can finally properly research these questions. They're so hard to even talk about!