Biography
Jonny Gunton
Before a scene has a story, it has a feeling.
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 created music and sound for the BRIT Awards, MTV Awards and RTS Awards.
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 began with a message. Danish singer Sophie Tusnelda-George had seen his natural history programmes in Denmark and offered her voice for the music. When Jonny heard it, he wanted to write something else with her entirely: a more intimate world of voice, electronics and atmosphere. Sophie passed away in 2020, and the music they made together remains deeply important to him.
Today he works from his Bristol studio across cinematic scoring, 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 film, broadcast, branded content and contemporary media. Through HEALHQ Studio he explores the same territory from the other side: not what sound does to a scene, but what it can do to a person.
Different work.
Same obsession.How sound changes the way we feel.