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.