# Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10676/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 73 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00475/) (2020)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)
- [Understanding Diffusion Objectives as the ELBO with Simple Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00848/) (2023)
- [Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17172/) (2023)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Fr'echet Audio Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08466/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [FreeAudio: Training-Free Timing Planning for Controllable Long-Form Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08557/) (2025)
- [OmniAudio: Generating Spatial Audio from 360-Degree Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14906/) (2025)
- [MOSPA: Human Motion Generation Driven by Spatial Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11949/) (2025)
- [Guiding Audio Editing with Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21625/) (2025)
- [PrismAudio: Decomposed Chain-of-Thoughts and Multi-dimensional Rewards for Video-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18833/) (2025)
- [Spatial-Omni: Spatial Audio Understanding Integration in Multimodal LLMs via FOA Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10738/) (2026)
- [PhaseCoder: Microphone Geometry-Agnostic Spatial Audio Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21124/) (2026)
- [SoundReactor: Frame-level Online Video-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02110/) (2025)
- [Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05220/) (2026)
- [SonoWorld: From One Image to a 3D Audio-Visual Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28757/) (2026)
- [Empowering Multimodal LLMs with External Tools: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10955/) (2025)
- [In-the-wild Audio Spatialization with Flexible Text-guided Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00927/) (2025)
- [ImmersiveFlow: Stereo-to-7.1.4 spatial audio generation with flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12950/) (2026)
- [FoleyDesigner: Immersive Stereo Foley Generation with Precise Spatio-Temporal Alignment for Film Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05731/) (2026)
- [Towards Streaming Synchronized Spatial Audio Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30940/) (2026)
- [Generating Moving 3D Soundscapes with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07318/) (2025)
- [TTMBA: Towards Text To Multiple Sources Binaural Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16564/) (2025)
- [StereoSync: Spatially-Aware Stereo Audio Generation from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05828/) (2025)
- [DOA Estimation with Lightweight Network on LLM-Aided Simulated Acoustic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08012/) (2025)
- [Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning via Progressive Compression for Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19932/) (2026)
- [PhysWave: Physics-Guided Latent Diffusion Models for Controllable Spatial Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29549/) (2026)
- [SAIL: Spatial Audio Intelligence with Large Language Models via Disentangled Acoustic-Spatial Encoding and Dual-Stream Q-Former](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34347/) (2026)
- [Audible World Models: Spatially Aware Sound Generation for 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38444/) (2026)
- [Hear the World in Stereo: Learning Dynamic Spatial Correspondence for Immersive Joint Video-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38748/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in mono-channel audio generation. However, when it comes to stereo audio generation, the soundscapes often have a complex scene of multiple objects and directions. Controlling stereo audio with spatial contexts remains challenging due to high data costs and unstable generative models. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to address these issues. We first construct a large-scale, simulation-based, and GPT-assisted dataset, BEWO-1M, with abundant soundscapes and descriptions even including moving and multiple sources. Beyond text modality, we have also acquired a set of images and rationally paired stereo audios through retrieval to advance multimodal generation. Existing audio generation models tend to generate rather random and indistinct spatial audio. To provide accurate guidance for Latent Diffusion Models, we introduce the SpatialSonic model utilizing spatial-aware encoders and azimuth state matrices to reveal reasonable spatial guidance. By leveraging spatial guidance, our model not only achieves the objective of generating immersive and controllable spatial audio from text but also extends to other modalities as the pioneer attempt. Finally, under fair settings, we conduct subjective and objective evaluations on simulated and real-world data to compare our approach with prevailing methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to generate spatial audio that adheres to physical rules.