If that sounds like intellectual activity above the level of qualia, the same is true for something as simple as the taste of food. We learn what apples taste like by tasting lots of apples and tasting things that aren’t apples and reflecting on and focusing our attention on experience of apples.
A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel sounds, I would argue, is because the learner literally cannot hear the differences at first. It's only after learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that production of the new sounds becomes possible.
One can think of other similar examples in the context of expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.
If you buy this argument, that learning can affect perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine how qualia itself might also be learned ex nihilo.
People in Georgia use language differently than people in Washington State.
People need to read more Camus and Freire and consider the extent to which relativity applies.