After attracting over 500,000 visitors in New York and Los Angeles, Pete M. Wyer’s The Forest Within came to Fitzrovia Chapel. This immersive sound installation combined seventy two voice choirs, including Grammy winners The Crossing, with layered natural recordings to create a screen free listening experience exploring the power of sound, nature and deep listening.
DATE SHOWN
After attracting more than 500,000 visitors in New York and Los Angeles, Pete M. Wyer’s The Forest Within Comes to the chapel.
The work includes 72-voice choirs (such as four-time Grammy Award winners The Crossing), in specially written and recorded works that are precisely mapped across a multi-speaker array and interwoven with evocative natural recordings — including a meticulously captured dawn chorus recorded simultaneously across 18 distinct locations as well as the occasional fairytale whispered deep within the sonic forest to create unexpected moments of wonder and discovery.
The installation offers a screen-free active listening experience, a journey to engage your most immersive sense — hearing, inviting visitors to explore rich, textured soundscapes that reveal new details with each encounter.
ABOUT
Pete M. Wyer is an award winning composer from England. He has created scores for the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Juilliard, Welsh National Opera, BBC Television and the Royal Opera House . He has written eight operas and music theatre works as well as many scores for modern dance and ballet. His iForestimmersive installations have received more than 500,000 visitors and have been created at New York Botanical Gardens, Brookfield Place and The Wild Center amongst others.
Pete maintains a commitment to exploration and innovation. His 2020 work ‘The Sky Beneath Our Feet’ for 9 choirs of 8 voices was mapped to physical locations across areas of California live oaks in Descanso Gardens, Los Angeles. It created the experience of encountering our own species as a part of nature, and used Pete’s unique score-mapping system, which incorporates physical space, along with pitch, rhythm, tone and dynamic, to direct the antiphony of the work throughout the entire area.
His ‘synchronised headphone choirs’ (2014, 2018, 2024 and 2025) have brought choral music to the streets; singers begin by being spread across a city. Singing begins at the exact same moment, wherever they are, synchronised via an app. Their routes then slowly converge over perhaps 40 minutes until they come together as a single, unified choir. In 2025, Pete’s setting of the ‘metta sutra’ (a 2,500 year old meditation) was performed across Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York, culminating at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
In 2009 his one-hour work for BBC Radio 3 with poet, Steve Dalachinsky ‘Insomnia Poems’, was selected for their ‘Best of 2009′. He has been a guest artist/lecturer at NYU, Juilliard, Wesleyan, VCU and other universities and is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, BMC, Bloedel and Bogliasco. In 2025, he is a panel judge for Bloedel and the special guest lecturer of the Linnean Society of London and of the Buddhist Society of London. His The Forest Within installation has been at The Fitzrovia Chapel, London and for a 5 month stint at the Omega Institute, New York.
Throughout his career, Pete has been recognized for visionary work, receiving numerous commissions from organisations across the UK and USA. His work is strongly driven by a desire to foster human connection, both to each other and to the natural world.
