Have you ever turned on the car radio wondering what’s playing in Argentina or Vietnam? Radio Garden, an online app, makes browsing foreign radio stations as easy as using Google Earth to check places. Hundreds of radio stations with a live internet feed are included and to pick one you only have to rotate the interactive globe.
Radio Garden is the brainchild of Transnational Radio, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and is designed by Studio Moniker. Besides radio stations, the website also features a History Section that broadcasts clips from the past, a Jingles Section which plays various radio jingles, and, finally, a Stories Section where users can contribute fun facts and tidbits about radio communication.
Not all available radio stations in the world are archived but there are more than enough to satisfy your curiosity. You will find most of the world listens to the same pop music but some local stations play national tunes so that was interesting for me. You might also discover new stations close by you never knew existed. Another thing you’ll notice is the distribution of radio stations which I think a study could correlate with economic development and the degree of freedom of expression. Europe and North America are packed with stations but the rest of the world, not so much. There are more available streams in Delaware than there are in the whole of Africa. You can also notice huge voids in geographically inaccessible areas like South America’s Amazon, Russia’s Siberia or mainland Australia.