Right now, as I type, it's six in the morning in Huixtla, Mexico. The radio is playing energetic Spanish hip-hop as people get ready for work. The music breaks, suddenly and inexplicably, into a banjo solo and just as I begin to get used to it cuts to the DJ reporting on the local weather.
Three in the morning in Alaska. Fairly relaxed jazz on KDLG Public radio. Is anybody in the studio, I wonder? Are they dozing as the music plays? Unlikely. Perhaps they arrive for work in the evening, small talk as the studio changes hands, settling into a chair and slipping headphones on. The person who DJs the early evening slot always sets the microphone so high, gotta adjust that.
Each radio station has their own jingles, accessible on the site's archive. Many have tiny editorial notes with them about the various stations and their DJs. It's nine in the evening in Kanoya, Japan, and FM Kanoya is playing Japanese language reggae, and it's alright, as radio stations discovered at random from across the globe go. It's alright, I'd tune in.
As we drove up past Nanaimo and Courtenay, the number of cars around us thinned and thinned until it was just us and forest roads for miles. Every hour or so, a gravel truck from one of the northern quarries would rumble past. Our phone signals dipped and died, and then the radio signals too, and we bumped through unmaintained roads and slowed as black bears loped from one side of the road to the other. We drove in silence most of the time. Peered out of the windows at the low mountains.
We were captivated, and we drove further and further North and the radio signal became stronger and stronger. And then going South several days later, the reverse, the man and woman fading to hours of silence, then the Victoria stations leaping into noise and Bruno Mars and weather reports.
If the goal of the internet was to create a connected community of global citizens, its shining achievement might have been the moment WREK in Atlanta streamed the first radio show over the web in 1993. The communities that grew around internet radio would come to reflect the borderless nature of the online world. And now, thanks to the near-ubiquity of internet access and the increased capabilities of the computers we all carry around in our pockets (you can start your own station with a mobile app), anyone from anywhere can broadcast into your living room.
The internet is responsible for many radio stations closing down, particularly ones that relied on shortwave. But if we've lost the old fun of trying to tune in to a distant signal late at night when atmospheric conditions were just right, we can now hear the world clearly.
Radio Garden was developed from 2013 and 2016 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This Dutch radio and digital research project was created under the supervision of Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in collaboration with the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and five other European universities.
The service presents itself as a way to narrow the boundaries form the radio. In 2016 Radio Garden had added more than 8000 radio stations worldwide, which is quite the accomplishment. About three years ago the project added an app that you can download on either Apple or Android devices. You can also use Radio Garden on the web.
The idea is very simple: Download the app (iOS or Android) or visit Rotate the globe and click on any green dot (each dot it a radio station), lay back and relax. You can also use the search tool to look for a radio by name, city, state, country, etc.
I don't know anywhere else to ask this. radio.garden is an aggregator of online streaming radio stations. In windows 10 on various machines, it shows a volume slider beside the play/pause controls. With the same version of firefox on windows 10, and still after upgrading to windows 11, the volume control doesn't show on microsoft surface. I have deleted display and audio drivers and let them update, and I have turned firefox hardware acceleration settings off (even though the settings indicates that it is only for graphics). I have also verified that microsoft edge also does not display the volume control.
Radio Garden is a website and mobile app that allows you to explore radio stations on a global map and listen to radio from all over the world! ?? Even though it's not specifically meant for Japan, you can find radio stations in different areas of Japan and listen to their local radio programs.
The website is simple and easy to use. The map shows green dots for radio stations, and once you click on a dot, it starts streaming the radio. If you are lucky, you might hear some regional dialects while you hop around radio stations all over Japan!
Radio Garden also displays the website for each radio station, so for the radio station websites that allow you to listen to the live broadcast, I created another HTML file with links to the radio station websites that I am interested in.
I think that Radio Garden would be a good resource for people that are interested in learning English, but I have not been using it lately for Italian. Since I like watching interviews / conversations in Italian, I look for interesting channels on YouTube that also have a website where I can watch the videos without ads. For radio stations, I prefer to use the websites where they show the schedule and what I am currently listening to.
To get started, simply spin the globe and zoom in on a place of interest. When you bring a dot inside the green circle at the center of the display, the feed for that station will automatically start playing. The name of the radio station will appear alongside suggestions for other stations in the same area, all of them playable.
Radio Garden is a particularly interesting website that allows you to browse live radio around the globe. Functioning a little like Google Earth, you're given a satellite view of the planet. Littered across the globe are little green dots, each of which represents one (or more) radio stations based in that location. Move the crosshair over a specific dot, and you'll hear the live stream of that radio station.
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. 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
In the section on History, you 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?
Then stop and 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 to make themselves at home in the world?
That's why I love a little app that's flown under the radar for even die-hard music lovers. Radio Garden is a free app for iPhones and Android devices that brings in tens of thousands of radio stations broadcasting live 24 hours a day.
Here's how it works: the app displays a 3D globe of the world with satellite imagery. As you rotate the world with your finger the app tunes in radio stations on the screen. It's like the search button on a car radio. The screen is covered by thousands of little green dots, each representing a different station. A circle on the screen locates one of those dots/stations and begins playing what the station is broadcasting at that moment.
The Radio Garden team says they're updating the "garden" daily by planting seeds (connecting more stations). The Radio Garden team says in the app description that they want to bring "distant voices close".
Most websites come and go, but not Radio Garden. The Dutch non-profit keeps its simple website interface, a 3D rendered globe you can move around with the radio stations appearing as green dots. Ever since it surpassed the 8,000-radio station mark, the interactive radio project remains on the airwaves - all around the world.
What would eventually become Radio Garden was a project started in 2013. As it exceeded 8,000 registered radio stations, it was announced at the 2016 Radio Conference, bringing the news to more people around the world. Its novelty is in the use of a relatively old technology, consolidated and presented using a simple interface.
Radio Garden was the result of investigating the role of radio concerning one's identity, asking, "What does home sound like?" The result was an interactive globe that users could move in any direction. They can zoom in on any city and see which stations are available and what music they play. Jonathan Puckey served as the principal designer; he recognizes that while the radio is everywhere--it is home". Puckey notes that radio is "no longer the tangible presence it once was". He then asks, "where is radio exactly?"
On the website, radio stations are arranged by their respective locations and then grouped by cities plotted on the three-dimensional map. Radio Garden covers about a thousand live streams from radio stations all over the world, except in some parts of China where their stream uses a different file format incompatible with the usual browsers.
Radio Garden works by web crawling, meaning it uses an algorithm to systematically search the Internet for streams coming from radio stations all around the world. The source sites from the web crawl are traced for the source location and are then overlaid on the map to pair the stream with its geographical locations.
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