PHALAR introduces a contrastive audio representation framework using phasor-based complex-valued heads, achieving ~70% r

PHALAR: Phasors for Learned Musical Audio Representations Stem retrieval, the task of matching missing stems to a given audio submix, is a key challenge currently limited by models that discard temporal information. We introduce PHALAR, a contrastive framework achieving a relative accuracy increase of up to $\approx 70\%$ over the state-of-the-art while requiring $<50\%$ of the parameters and a 7$\times$ training speedup. By utilizing a Learned Spectral Pooling layer and a complex-valued head, PHALAR enforces pitch-equivariant and phase-equivariant biases. PHALAR establishes new retrieval state-of-the-art across MoisesDB, Slakh, and ChocoChorales, correlating significantly higher with human coherence judgment than semantic baselines. Finally, zero-shot beat tracking and linear chord probing confirm that PHALAR captures robust musical structures beyond the retrieval task.