Want to hear dinosaurs ‘sing’? These instruments bring prehistory back to life

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.

Coaxing music from fossils

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. The air vibrates a mechanical larynx, and the sound swells through the 3D-printed skull’s airways before emerging as a haunting sound. With a change in breath, the calls can shift from a whisper to a full-bodied roar.

Brown later built another version of the instrument with materials that carried sound more clearly. In 2015, these early versions of Dinosaur Choir earned her an honorary mention at a sound art competition in Austria.

After a few quiet years, the project found new momentum in 2021, when Brown received a Fulbright grant to do research at the University of Alberta. There she teamed up with Cezary Gajewski, an associate professor of design studies who had built kiosks, furniture and sculptures, but never a musical instrument. A video Brown sent Gajewski of herself playing Dinosaur Choir instruments had piqued his curiosity, and the two began to collaborate.

Along with other collaborators, Brown and Gajewski analyzed the latest CT scans and 3D models of the Corythosaurus to build a replica of an adult Corythosaurus head.

The central challenge for Brown and Gajewski’s design was born from the pandemic: how to let people “play” without blowing into an instrument. Their solution was to outfit the instruments with sensors that could pick up the vibrations of breath or voice and convert them into electrical signals—much like a guitar pickup, Gajewski said.

The signals feed into a digital voice box that causes a speaker to send air waves through the replicated dinosaur skull. A camera tracks changes in mouth shape, which also affects the sound.

The voice box comes with several digital models that can be swapped in and out. One model is based on the syrinx, the vocal organ that lets birds sing. Brown added it after a 2023 study described a fossilized larynx of an armored dinosaur that showed bird-like traits, suggesting some non-avian dinosaurs may have produced sounds close to those of modern birds.

Part of the symphony

In March, Brown presented her Dinosaur Choir at a contest in Georgia where inventors from around the world showcase new instruments. Dinosaur Choir won third place. A few months later, Brown lugged one of her dinosaur skulls to a music instrument conference in Australia, where it drew curiosity, questions and plenty of attention—something Brown says happens wherever she goes.

During the conference, the instrument “was right near the elevator and the stairs, so it was really nice acoustics,” Brown said. “I saw a few people, as they were waiting for the elevator, play the dinosaur a little before they left. I thought that was cool.”

For those interested in playing the Dinosaur Choir instruments—something Brown taught herself to do over years of practice—she wants to make the 3D printing plans publicly available sometime in the late spring or summer. Gajewski says printing an instrument isn’t cheap, but for the most dedicated players (or 3D-printing hobbyists), the chance may be worth the cost.

If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, Brown has made the Dinosaur Choir software available online. All you need is a computer microphone and camera.

As for the future of Dinosaur Choir, Brown intends to branch out from hadrosaurs to a plant-eating armored dinosaur called a nodosaur, which lived over 100 million years ago. This dinosaur, she said, is completely different, featuring curlicue nasal passages. A nodosaur fossil was found in Tarrant County in the 1990s, she said, and the CT scans for it are open source. “It would be kind of a local dinosaur, which I thought would be cool.”

Ultimately, Brown imagines a future where the Dinosaur Choir is played with other instruments—maybe even a full orchestra—its ancient sounds blending with winds, brass and strings.

She has already played an earlier version of the instrument alongside a tuba in a piece called “How to Speak Dinosaur Courtship,” which she describes as a dinosaur wooing a tuba “Pepe Le Pew–style.” With the newer designs, Brown has practiced with a saxophonist in the Dallas Winds.

The goal, she said, is to bring “this embodied experience into dinosaur sounds. By blowing into the dinosaur, you kind of become one with it the same way when I play the accordion, I feel like I’m one with the accordion. I’m interested in developing this really deep empathy with something that is extinct.”

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