The roar of a T. rex, made iconic by Jurassic Park, has become the soundtrack of prehistory.
The roar of a T. rex, made iconic by Jurassic Park, has become the soundtrack of prehistory.
In reality, no one—not even paleontologists—can say for certain what dinosaurs sounded like, though there have been plenty of guesses. The mystery has fueled decades of research, and, for Courtney Brown, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University, it has inspired her to seek answers through an unexpected medium: music.
For more than a decade, Brown has been building musical instruments modeled on skulls of hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs that roamed the planet some 70 million years ago. Trained as a sound artist and computer engineer, Brown hopes her fusion of paleontology and music will feel like an immersive act—not just an artistic experiment, but a way of bridging the past and present.
Brown calls her instruments Dinosaur Choir, a name reflecting her intention for them to be played together. The seed for the project was planted on a cross-country road trip in 2011. During a pit stop at a museum in New Mexico, Brown heard what was believed to be the call of a Parasaurolophus, a leaf-eating hadrosaur with a long, distinctive head crest.
« I pressed the [exhibit’s] button, I heard the sound and it was amazing », said Brown. « I thought dinosaurs were singers, too, because I’m a singer. I felt very connected to dinosaurs for possibly the first time. »
That moment sparked a question that has since guided her work: What if you could sound like a dinosaur?
After beginning her doctorate of musical arts at Arizona State University, Brown set out to build her first Dinosaur Choir instrument.
She turned to science to reimagine the voice of the Corythosaurus, another kind of hadrosaur. Using CT scans of a teenage Corythosaurus skull, she and her collaborators 3D-printed the dinosaur’s head crest and airways, the built-in resonance chambers that once carried its calls.
Paleontologists believe the crest of a hadrosaur allowed it to produce deep, booming sounds that may have warned others of predators, kept herds together or attracted mates.
Between 2011 and 2013, Brown completed the first model of the instrument, which is played with a mouthpiece, much like a trumpet.
