I actually wrote down some thoughts about audio phase in a previous blog post: https://sander.ai/2020/03/24/audio-generation.html#motivation https://sander.ai/2

I actually wrote down some thoughts about audio phase in a previous blog post: https://sander.ai/2020/03/24/audio-generation.html#motivation https://sander.ai/2020/03/24/audio-generation.html#motivatio... I have an example audio clip in there where the phase information has been replaced with random noise, so you can perceive the effect. It certainly does matter perceptually, but it is tricky to model, and small "vocoder" models do a decent job of filling it in post-hoc.