According to Statista, as of 2019, the average U.S consumer spends an hour and forty-two minutes daily listening to the radio. While this number has been decreasing gradually over the recent years, people around the world still spend a very sizable portion of their days listening to their favorite radio station, be it politics, music, or sports.
To help people around the world find new sounds and new voices from stations they may not know of, Studio Puckey and Moniker created a curated database for international radio called Radio Garden. The project is described to be “an exhibition project commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the context of the research project Transnational Radio Encounters“.
Happy World Radio Day! We are excited to be releasing a bunch of updates to https://t.co/fJ6q8dgC2c in the coming days, including our most requested feature by far: channel, place & country search! Stay tuned.
— Studio Puckey (@StudioPuckey) February 13, 2019
“Bringing distant voices close”
The Radio Garden website shows a rotating globe with “little seeds” on it, also known as radio stations. Users can travel around this “garden” and look for new and interesting radio stations, whether close to home or on the other side of the world. In 2018, the mobile app for this launched on iOS and Android. Finally, in 2019, the garden became an independent company to serve radio listeners around the world.
According to Radio Garden, the service is continuously improving with new stations and a better user experience. They shared that “our dedicated team is hard at work tending to the garden on a daily basis. Planting seeds for the future and keeping the weeds at bay”.
Radio Garden aims to unify the world in a way that few other means of communication can connect people despite distances and borders. The team also explained that “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.”
Thanks to @barakkassar for introducing me to an Earth-wide, radio stethoscope: https://t.co/YmpWQmK6Lk pic.twitter.com/fPVqOMrLfQ
— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) February 1, 2017
Radio Garden hopes to gain a larger following of supportive radio lovers as it adds more stations and improves its user interface. With this innovative new service, maybe people can pause their busy lives now and then just to listen to something new.
Photo credit: The featured image has been taken by NASA.
Source: Statista.com
