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The recently launched online radio platform allows users to explore an interactive globe filled with radio’s past and present. 

Listening without borders

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 with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away – or using local community radio to make and enrich new homes. 

Different layers

Four different layers of the interactive globe allow listeners to dive into radio’s border-crossing:

• 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’?
• 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?
• 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?
• 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 the globe? How do they use make themselves at home in the world?

Transnational Radio Encounters

Radio Garden is developed as part of the HERA-funded European collaborative research project (TRE), directed by Prof Golo Föllmer from the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Halle (Germany) along with Dr Alec Badenoch and Prof Sonja de Leeuw from Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, Caroline Mitchell of Sunderland ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, Jacob Kreutzfeld of Copenhagen ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, Peter Lewis from London Metropolitan ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ and Per Jauert of Aarhus ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ.  In addition, it forms part of ’s run up to celebrating 100 years of Radio in 1919, next to current TRE-related research, forthcoming in Golo Föllmer and Alexander Badenoch, (eds) Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to and Old Medium (Transcript Verlag). The platform is designed by Studio.Puckey in collaboration with Studio Moniker.

Radio Garden is designed to be a growing platform, including a physical exhibition in the years to come – the ‘seeds’ that have been planted here are the first inspiration to filling the globe further.