Embodiments described herein provide a combined multi-source time difference of arrival (TDOA) tracking and voice activity detection (VAD) mechanism that is applicable for generic array geometries, e.g., a microphone array that lies on a plane. The combined multi-source TDOA tracking and VAD mechanism scans the azimuth and elevation angles of the microphone array in microphone pairs, based on which a planar locus of physically admissible TDOAs can be formed in the multi-dimensional TDOA space of multiple microphone pairs. In this way, the multi-dimensional TDOA tracking reduces the number of calculations that was usually involved in traditional TDOA by performing the TDOA search for each dimension separately.