PhaseCoder: Microphone Geometry-Agnostic Spatial Audio Understanding for Multimodal LLMs

This paper presents PhaseCoder, a transformer-only spatial audio encoder that operates independently of microphone geometry. It processes raw multichannel audio and microphone coordinates to perform localization and generate robust spatial embeddings. This enables multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform complex spatial reasoning and targeted transcription from various microphone arrays.