Jonny Gunton

Jonny Gunton writes for the feeling.

For more than twenty-five years, his music and sound have appeared on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Discovery, Disney, National Geographic and MTV, including the RTS Award-winning Lost Land of the Tiger. He has also scored short films, made the title sequence for Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and created sound design for four series of Big Brother.

Growing up just outside Bristol, Jonny was drawn to atmosphere, texture and the strange emotional pull of sound. Church bells. Analogue electronics. World music. Field recordings. Film soundtracks. Distortion. He never saw the point in choosing between them. The bells were the first to leave a mark: syncopation. Repeating patterns locking into each other and slipping across the beat, so that the whole moves in a way no single bell does.

In the 1990s he spent time at Philip Glass’ Looking Glass Studios in New York, surrounded by music built from repetition, shifting patterns and rhythmic pulse. What stayed with him wasn’t a way of writing music but a conviction: tone comes first. Find the emotional weather of a scene and everything else begins to make sense.

That thread runs through his own scores: rhythm shifting underneath the picture, texture arriving before you notice it. Documentary. Natural history. Drama. Advertising. Title sequences. Awards shows. The brief changes, the thinking doesn’t. Sometimes the answer is orchestral. Sometimes electronic. Sometimes it is barely music at all.

Drøm is the musical collaboration between Jonny and Danish singer Sophie Tusnelda-George: voice, electronics and atmosphere, in a more intimate world away from his screen work. It began with a message. Sophie had seen his natural history programmes in Denmark and offered her voice for the music. When Jonny heard her, he wanted to make something with her that had nothing to do with television. Sophie passed away in 2020, and the music they made together remains deeply important to him. Listen to Drøm

Today he works from his Bristol studio across scoring for screen, sound design, field recording and immersive sonic environments, creating each project around what the film, space or experience needs.

Through Abstract Audio, he creates bespoke music and sound for TV and film. HEALHQ Studio is the other side of the same work: immersive recordings and one-to-one sessions combining sound with subconscious reset to help people switch off, settle and change patterns that have become hard to shift. The question isn’t what sound does to a scene, but what it can do to a person. Visit HEALHQ Studio

Different work.
Same obsession.How sound changes the way we feel.