A Comparative Study of Binaural and Surround Radio Drama’s Mise-en-scène and the Means of Converting One to Another with Technical Approach

Three-dimensional radio dramas can be divided into several categories with regards to recording and reproducing techniques. Nevertheless, in all of these systems the audience is surrounded by the reproduced sounds. In these systems, the audience is located at the center of an imaginary sphere and audio objects are located with coordinates (x, y, z) with regard to the center of the sphere. The difference in reproducing three-dimensional sound lies in how to cover this imaginary sphere. The most popular 3D technique is the binaural technique and one of pseudo-3D techniques is the surround technique. In this paper, we first introduce the properties of binaural and surround systems and then will discuss their transformation techniques using an example. The binaural system is a system based on using headphones which has some distinguishable properties including a very realistic sound image and using only two channels to reproduce 3D sound images. But this system has some troubles; first, distinguishing between the front and the back of the audience due to front-back confusion; and secondly, it is not compatible with other audio reproducing systems. In the surround system on the other hand, which is based on using speakers, the sound image would not be reproduced with as much details as in the binaural system, but it is compatible with lower order systems. Knowing the methods of converting the binaural mise-en-scène to the surround mise-en-scène and vice versa, makes way for audience-centered 3D drama regardless of the reproducing system. The sound image in the binaural system is an imaginary sphere with the audience at its center and surrounding them, while in the surround system it is a cross section of such a sphere. The mise-en-scène in the binaural system consists of a spiral based on zooming movements in the right and left ear of the audience and spiral movements in a particular point around him. It gives its place to a surrounding mise-en-scène where the exact location of the image shaping is not clear. Furthermore, in the surround system the role of height is ignored. In the binaural system, reproducing radio drama does not depend on the system in which it is reproduced, while in the surround system, it can cause the perspective to lose its realism due to the changes in the spatial scales of the place where is being reproduced. Overall, due to the mentioned differences between these two systems, first the role of height should be removed in converting the mise-en-scène from binaural to surround. The conversion would be a little more difficult should the height have a dramatic role in the drama. In such cases, imagining the correct height should be left to the audience imagination, or the story should not be considered for a radio drama in the first place. In addition, the mise-en-scène should be moved from the points near the audience to some points more far away from them and exact mise-en-scènes should be replaced with mise-en-scène regions. Studying such technical changes leads us to studying aesthetic changes