Joining the dots

A new website, radio.garden, lets us browse radio stations across the globe. Nothing new about that. That’s been a key feature of wireless since the days of valves and crystals. Turning a knob and stopping off at Hilversum, Motala, Ankara or Reykjavik, if and when short-wave reception was possible, is part of radio’s magic, listening in to life elsewhere without having to leave the house. Now, though, with radio.garden (developed in Amsterdam by Jonathan Puckey for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and part-funded by the EU), it’s possible to turn the globe that appears on your computer screen as soon as you log on to the site and to sweep across India, Africa or Australia, stopping off wherever you find a green dot. Click on the dot and you could find yourself listening to Gene Pitney in Namibia, to Norwegian country-and-western from Stavanger, or to a discussion on women’s rights from Abeokuta in Nigeria.

The website went viral as soon as it was launched just before Christmas, with ten million hits in ten days. Part of its fascination is the ease with which you can traverse the globe, stopping off wherever you see a dot. Not every radio station is yet identified on the site (more are being added each week). There are only two green dots in Egypt; the vastness of Russia has a mere handful. But it’s as if the sounds of the world are suddenly free and available to listen to at the swipe of a fingernail.

It’s a bit disorientating at first to discover that many of the stations sound very alike, playing the same kind of universal pop, with jingles straight out of the Radio 2 songbook (you can change settings on the site so that the green dots become yellow dots for ‘stories’, short clips of people talking about their listening experiences, red dots for ‘history’, tapping in to key moments in broadcast history around the world, or blue dots for ‘jingles’, those irritating earwigs by which stations identify themselves).