Falmouth researchers create immersive score for new film exploring Cornish temperate rainforests
28 May 2025
Researchers in Falmouth’s Centre for Blended Realities have created the soundscape for an immersive film which is set to premiere internationally this June.
Entitled Gans'n Dhama Wedhen – Cornish for ‘In the company of the Mother Tree’ – the audio-visual experience aims to broaden our understanding of temperate rainforests in the UK and to deepen our capacity to listen with other-than-human life.
Developed during E3 research secondments with Falmouth’s Centre for Blended Realities, Gans'n Dhama Wedhen is an affective synthesis of 360 cinematography, immersive soundscape composition, and bilingual voice.
An immersive ‘ambisonic’ score lies at the heart of Gans'n Dhama Wedhen, putting the piece in a full-sphere surround sound format. Developed from field recordings captured at Cabilla Cornwall’s temperate rainforest, the work is already gaining national attention.
The original score has been created by AMATA-based researchers Dr Antti Saario and Dr D Ferrett, working as composer and vocalist/narrative consultant respectively. The film was written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Dr Adam Laity through a commission by Screen Cornwall – won by production company o-region.
The sounds feature in Penguin’s audiobook Our Oaken Bones by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, and have been aired on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme as well as appearing in the latest episode of Gillian Burke’s If I Ruled the World podcast, ‘Episode 36: I would restore Britain as a Rainforest Nation’.
Following a VIP screening as part of the Plymouth Urban Tree Festival earlier this month, the film will receive its international premiere at the sold-out Fulldome Festival in Brno this June – home to the largest immersive dome in Europe with a spatial audio environment for which the work was designed.
The Gans'n Dhama Wedhen score in more detail
As the project’s immersive audio composer, Antti created a sixth-order ambisonic score for the Real Immersive dome’s 19.1 sound system from field recordings made on site at Cabilla, and multiple bilingual voice recordings performed by D in both Cornish and English. Drawing on his electroacoustic composition training with Birmingham’s renowned B.E.A.S.T. system, Antti developed a spatial sonic environment that evokes the entanglement of the woodland, its underground communication networks and unseen life, working with the concept of ‘dark sound ecologies’ blending both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ sound. His research paper, ‘Immersed in Cabilla: Creating a Fulldome Experience of an Ancient Oak Woodland and Temperate Rainforest’, presented at the Innovation in Music conference in Oslo last year, will be published by Routledge in 2025.
D voiced the Mother Tree and other woodland trees in both Cornish and English, exploring the symbolic, sonic, and cultural potency of arboreal presences through layered vocal performances and drone. Her forthcoming paper, ‘The Mother Tree and Voicing Kinship: The Entanglement Between Celtic Identity and EcoGothic Sonic Representations of Cornish Woodland’, draws on autoethnography, her work in dark sound, feminist ecophilosophy and sound studies. It reflects on how sound-based practice and listening can foster more-than-human forms of kinship and critically inform understandings of Celtic identity, the ‘mother tongue’ and the feminine.
Image credits: Dr Adam Laity
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