A garden of radios

Do you know what’s playing on radio in Kazakhstan? An innovative website Radio Garden can help you tune in. It is just radio, and the world is your garden, literally. The interactive website presents the entire earth covered in tiny green dots, each representing a radio station currently on air. It has up to 8,000 […]

Do you know what’s playing on radio in Kazakhstan? An innovative website Radio Garden can help you tune in.

It is just radio, and the world is your garden, literally.

The interactive website presents the entire earth covered in tiny green dots, each representing a radio station currently on air.

It has up to 8,000 stations so far, and more are signing up to be a part of the global radio project.

It explores how the entire world is connected through communication—and how humans interact through sound.

It begins as a literal garden. Once logged on, “seeds” are planted, which then begin to “sprout”, covering a spinning globe in tiny green dots.

Your location might bring a radio station closer to your, but spin the globe to listen to a radio from thousands of kilometers around the world.

It is radio hopping—from the crackle of a worldband receiver of All India Radio in India to the clear-cut stereo of Kapital FM in Abuja.

Skip from a Portuguese radio grinding rhumba, to a US radio blasting rock, to a West Indies one grinding Sanskrit devotionals, and somewhere in Denmark a radio pumps hiphop.

And if you don’t know what you are listening to, don’t bother. The jingle section offers a “world wide crash course” in station identification that tells you within a fraction of a second what kind of programmes you are likely to hear.

Joyful? Trustworthy? Up to the minute? You won’t know until you try it out.

And a history section lets you tune into “clips from throughout radio history that show how radio has tried to cross borders,” the developers say.

The stories section is a look into how people around the world listen beyond their walls.

Radio Garden is based on an international research project in cooperation with universities in Denmark, UK and the Netherlands.

Concept and production for Radio Garden was by Studio Puckey and Moniker.

Already Radio Garden is garnering avid listeners, and more radio broadcasters around the world are putting their programming up for worldwide listening—at the click of a mouse.