Radio Garden lets you travel around and tune into the globe

The interactive Radio Garden website gives you the possibility to hop around the globe on your mobile device or desktop, click on a place somewhere on the globe and listen to radio stations all over the world, whether in Saudi Arabia, Switzterland, Hong Kong, Brazil or USA: wherever you like!

Open the website and you’ll see a 3D-globe and a lot of green dots. Let the globe rotate, swing your mouse over the dots, click, choose a station, listen and enjoy. It’s that easy.

Radio Garden lets you hop around the globe and listen to radio stations all over the world

Click the image to get there:

Here is the local station of “Apple FM” in Hong Kong:

Radio Garden incorporates results from the international research project TRE (Transnational Radio Encounters) directed by Golo Föllmer at Martin-Luther University Halle, in co-operation with the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark, London Metropolitan and the University of Sunderland in the UK, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away – or using local community radio to make and enrich new homes. By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. Radio Garden allows listeners to explore processes of broadcasting and hearing identities across the entire globe.

This is the local station “Alif Alif EM” in Ryadh, Saudi Arabia:

There are three sections on the website you can choose from:

In the section Live, you can explore a world or radio as it is happening right now. Tune into any place on the globe: what sounds familiar? What sounds foreign? Where would you like to travel and what sounds like ‘home’?

In the section on History one can tune into clips from throughout radio history that show how radio has tried to cross borders. How have people tried to translate their nations into the airwaves? What did they say to the world? How do they engage in conversation across linguistic and geographical barriers?

Jingles offers a world-wide crash course in station identification. How do stations signal within a fraction of a second what kind of programmes you are likely to hear? How do they project being joyful, trustworthy, or up to the minute?

Finally, one can listen to radio Stories where listeners past and present tell how they listen beyond their walls. How do they imagine the voices and sounds from around they globe? How do they use make themselves at home in the world?

This is “Radio Web 24 Horas” in Sao Paulo, Brazil:

If you want to submit your radio station to Radio Garden, please send the following information to contact@puckey.studio
and submit:
– Station name
– Station website
– Streaming MP3 URL
– City, Country

This is the local station of “RadioGrischa” in Chur, Switzerland:

The knowledge generated in TRE is disseminated through podcasts, CDs and radio broadcasts as well as through diverse written formats, workshops and an exhibition at Sound and Vision in Hilversum. TRE aims at establishing a new transnational agenda in radio research. Moving through and beyond national and comparative paradigms in order to investigate radio’s transnational structures and forms, TRE places radio research within contemporary discussions about migration, cultural identities, encounters and memories by generating new knowledge about the meaning of radio and listening in the age of globalisation and digitisation.