Courtney Brown is a musician — she specializes in music made with new instruments.
She’s also a professor at Southern Methodist University, where she directs a choir that performs music using one of Brown’s most innovative instruments: dinosaur skulls.
It’s an idea that began several years ago on a road trip. Brown was on her way to Arizona State University to pursue a degree in digital media and performance.
As she told The Show, she made a fateful pit stop.
Full conversation
COURTNEY BROWN: Yeah, so we stopped by Tucumcari at the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum, and they had an exhibit with the sound of a Parasaurolophus. So you could press a button and then you heard the sound. To me, this was amazing. And, you know, I realized that dinosaurs could be singers, and I'm a singer, so I felt like I understood them in a way I hadn't before.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, well, could you describe the sound?
BROWN: Well, it was this deep, low, resonant sound.
[SOUND PLAYS]
What they did was just model the sound coming through the Parasaurolophus crest. It has this long crest that scientists believe was used for sound resonation.
DINGMAN: This experience clearly stuck with you because now you have started this dinosaur choir at SMU where members of the choir create sounds by blowing into replica dinosaur skulls via a small tube. Talk a little bit about moving from hearing this sound and thinking about dinosaur sounds in kind of a new way to wanting to replicate them.
BROWN: Well, we take CT scans of dinosaur skulls, and then once you separate the anatomy and the CT scans, then you have this skull, which is often like, like part of it can be crushed or deformed. And so you have to go through this process of undeforming it, or we call it retrodeformation. And then we print it on PLA plastic printers. And so then to create the actual sound, I basically find bioacoustical models of bird syringes, so bird vocal boxes. So basically I take a set of mathematical equations that describe how sound pressure is transformed by motion of the vocal cords. And then I code that so that it creates sound in real time.
DINGMAN: Are you using that approach to modeling the sound because the structure of the skulls suggests that that would be the closest analog to what these dinosaurs would've sounded like?
BROWN: That's a good question. So dinosaur vocalization is extremely controversial right now, but in 2023, Junki Yoshida, among others, released a paper where they identified the first dinosaur larynx. an ankylosaur, which is a distant relative of the dinosaurs that I work with. And so I use that as an inspiration.
DINGMAN: So could you describe for us the sounds that come out of these dinosaur skulls when you and your fellow members of the choir blow into them? Because, you know, I think a lot of people listening to this maybe haven't even considered what dinosaurs sounded like. But if they have, I'm guessing it's somewhat like me where they imagined, you know, like the T-Rex in "Jurassic Park," like roaring. And that's not the type of sound that you and the choir are making.
BROWN: Right. So the later models, I'm using a model of a dove coo, so it's based on a dove, but it's more like a rounded sound, but like lower.
[SOUND PLAYS]
The larger that archosaurs are, so birds and crocodiles and dinosaurs are archosaurs, they tend to do a lot of closed mouth vocalization. And so that's like kind of an aspect. Of course, were the sound is coming out through the nose, if it's being resonated through the nasal passages.
DINGMAN: What do we know, if we know, about whether or not dinosaurs were musical in their sound-making, or how they used sound to communicate? And how similar do you think the sounds that your skulls make are to that sound-making?
BROWN: OK, so this is a sticky question. And first I'm going to say that my specialty is music and computer science. I do work with a paleontologist, but I will say that we know about the anatomy and some traces that dinosaurs have, but vocalization is a behavior.
And so even if we did find the anatomy, it's like hard to say how we would determine what that behavior was. I mean, we know that birds sing and dinosaurs are related to birds. And we know that alligators make sounds and crocodiles make sounds at each other. But we actually don't know for sure that dinosaurs made sound at all.
So I am using biological models of bird and then speculating. It's really about letting your imagination fill in the gaps where there are no, there's very little data.
DINGMAN: Yeah, as you were describing the combination of scientific backdrop and, you know, unknown behavior of dinosaurs, the phrase that came to my mind was speculative fiction, except that you're making music instead of, you know, writing a story.
BROWN: Yeah. It's hard to say like what is authentic or what is not authentic, what is accurate and what is not accurate. I have information. I mean, I took measurements and I'm using biological data, but I'm also filling in a lot of things I don't know.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Tell me what's exciting to you about that as an artist and as a musician, what do you think is exciting about playing in that speculative space?
BROWN: I would like to connect with the impossible. It's about how we are like empathic with another creature. Like at the core of it, it's like if a dinosaur is a singer, then in some way, I understand that dinosaur, that like reading about it or seeing something doesn't hit me in the same way. I play a musical instrument and I'm going to I have this experience that this instrument becomes a part of me.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
BROWN: So if I work with this dinosaur and I play this dinosaur instrument, then in a sense, that dinosaur also becomes a part of me. Mammals rose because the dinosaurs died. It opened all these, you know, niches. that the mammals filled and eventually gave rise to us. In a sense, they're a part of us, you know, in the ecology of life.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
BROWN: And to me, I think that's important.
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