Photo: Wes McRae/Georgia Tech School of Music.
Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument that reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus — a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
Where will the imagination of science-oriented artists take us next? Here’s the story of two imagineers who investigated how dinosaurs might have sounded back in the day.
Verity Burns writes at Wired, “What did dinosaurs really sound like? If you’ve ever found yourself asking that question, a musical project using 3D models of dino skulls could be getting closer to answering it. …
“Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument developed by artists Courtney Brown and Cezary Gajewski, which reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus—a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
“To make a sound, the user stands in front of a camera while blowing into a microphone. Depending on how hard they blow and the shape of their mouth as they do, the vocalizations that resonate through the dinosaur’s skull will change. In effect, the user’s breath becomes the dinosaur’s breath. The result is not the roar that we hear in the movies, but something that sounds more like a deep wail.
“The instrument has just been recognized at Georgia Tech’s 2025 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, an event that brings together inventors from around the world to discuss ideas on the future of music. …
“ ‘In 2011, we were on a family road trip and we stopped off at a dinosaur museum in New Mexico,’ Brown tells Wired. ‘There I saw an exhibit of a Parasaurolophus, which had crests like a Corythosaurus. There had been many theories as to why this family of dinosaurs had these crests, but researchers have settled on the idea that it could have been for sound resonation. As a musician, I felt empathy with them.’ …
“Brown was inspired and immediately started work on her first project, Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls, which is the work that Dinosaur Choir continues. Both projects focus on the Corythosaurus, but at different stages of their lifespan to investigate how changes to the crest in adult maturity affects their sound. However, the biggest difference between the two projects is the way the sound is made — the reimagining of the dinosaur’s vocal box.
“ ‘With Rawr!, we used a mechanical larynx, so people would have to actually blow into a mouthpiece to create the sound. But once we started exhibiting it, we realized it wouldn’t be possible for people to interact with it in a way that was hygienic — and the pandemic solidified that. That’s when I started thinking about something more computational. And as I have a computer science degree, it also made more sense.’
“The work on Dinosaur Choir officially began in 2021, with Brown traveling to Canada, where the Corythosaurus is supposed to have lived, to update her research. She and Gajewski worked with paleontologist Thomas Dudgeon, from the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, to analyze the most recent CT scans and 3D fabrications. From those, they built a life-size replica of an adult Corythosaurus’ head, right down to its intricate nasal passages.
“ ‘I’m extremely proud of my nasal passages,’ jokes Brown. ‘I learned CT segmentation for about a year to get them as accurate as possible, taking into consideration the effects that being buried for millions of years would also have had on them.’
“With the skull model complete, work then began on imagining the dinosaur vocalizations themselves. Recreating the vocal box in computational form gave Brown much more control to test out new, and perhaps even conflicting research, without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
“ ‘The models are based on a set of mathematical equations that relate to the mechanics of the voice — things like changes in air pressure and a number of other affected variables through time,’ she says. …
“So far, Brown has developed two models for Dinosaur Choir — one based on the syrinx of a raven, and a more recent one based on that of a dove, but she is also working on one of an alligator too. As these models are computational, they can be switched between in real time during a performance, and participants can also experiment with different trachea lengths and vocal membrane widths to hear the effects on the sound. …
“ ‘We [can’t] completely rule out that non-avian dinosaurs maybe didn’t vocalize at all. Soft tissue [like vocal chords] rarely preserves, and the vocalizations are also a type of behavior that leaves no fossils at all. In my heart, I truly believe they vocalized, but feelings are not facts. So much is lost to time.’ ”
More at Wired, here.
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