Radio.garden has been around for five years. But I had never heard of it until I saw this post from Mark Evanier, appropriately titled Another Reason the Internet is Amazing. Here it is, in its entirety.
“At this link, you’ll find a map of the world covered with little green dots. Every green dot represents a radio station at that location and if you click on the dot, you can hear that radio station. In some cases, you’ll have your choice of many in the same city. That’s enough radio to last you for the rest of your life…and several lives after that.”
What IS this? From December 2016: “The new website Radio Garden is as tangible a representation of this global community as you can get. The site, which launched this week, lets users to tune in to thousands of online radio streams from all over the world… by hovering over a location on a map.
“The site is a collaboration between the researchers on the Transnational Radio Encounters project in Germany, and the Amsterdam-based design firms Moniker and Studio Puckey.”
This is amazing. I started in my local area but wandered off all over the world. Europe is heavily represented. African stations are primarily coastal, but I found quite a few from Kenya. Places with deserts or mountains don’t have tons of radio stations. China is underrepresented, but there are 15 stations in Beijing, including CNR Classical Music Radio. Music from Pirque, Chile sounded like regional folk instrumentals.
As close as I’ll probably get to Tahiti
I probably spent the most time with Pape’ete, Tahiti, Hiti FM. It’s pop music but none I had ever heard. Your experiences will be different. Try the Search bar. And yes, there is an app for this.
The other thing I learned is that .garden is in fact a Top-Level Domain. It seems like an oddly appropriate choice for the site, seeding the planet with different voices, different sounds.
Maybe it IS a small world, after all.