SALM: Spatial Audio Language Model with Structured Embeddings for Understanding and Editing

Abstract: Spatial audio understanding is essential for accurately perceiving and interpreting acoustic environments. However, existing audio-LLMs struggle with processing spatial audio and perceiving spatial acoustic scenes. We introduce the Spatial Audio LLM (SALM), a novel framework that bridges spatial audio and language via multi-modal contrastive learning. SALM consists of a text encoder and a dual-branch audio encoder, decomposing spatial sound into semantic and spatial components through structured audio embeddings. Key features of SALM include seamless alignment of spatial and text representations, separate and joint extraction of spatial and semantic information, zero-shot direction classification and robust support for spatial audio editing. Experimental results demonstrate that SALM effectively captures and aligns cross-modal representations. Furthermore, it supports advanced editing capabilities, such as altering directional audio using text-based embeddings.