For decades, the mighty roars of dinosaurs have thundered through movies, TV shows, and filled the imaginations of children and adults alike. However, you’d be surprised to know that in reality, no one, including scientists, actually knows what dinosaurs sounded like.
Fossils preserve bones, not voices, leaving both filmmakers and paleontologists to rely on guesses when it comes to recreating dinosaur sound. This is why the question of how to hear the echoes of creatures that vanished 66 million years ago has sparked both scientific and artistic curiosity.
Now, Courtney Brown, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU), has taken a bold and creative step forward. She has spent more than ten years blending paleontology, music, computer science, and 3D printing to create the Dinosaur Choir, musical instruments modeled on dinosaur skulls.
Her work brings us closer than ever to understanding the real dinosaur voices.
Decoding dinosaur sound with breath and bones
Brown’s journey began in 2011 during a road trip, when she pressed a button at a museum in New Mexico and heard the reconstructed call of a Parasaurolophus, a duck-billed dinosaur with a long, trumpet-like crest.
The haunting sound struck her as deeply musical, and she wondered, what if humans could sing like dinosaurs? “I thought dinosaurs were singers, too, because I’m a singer. I felt very connected to dinosaurs for possibly the first time,” Brown said.
That question became the seed for her lifelong project. To find an answer, Brown turned to hadrosaurs such as Corythosaurus, plant-eaters from about 70 million years ago.
These dinosaurs had elaborate head crests connected to their nasal passages, which scientists believe worked as natural resonance chambers. These structures may have allowed the animals to produce deep, booming calls, warning others of predators, keeping herds together, or attracting mates.
Brown started by studying CT scans of a young Corythosaurus skull, which captured the fossil’s inner airways in fine detail. With the help of collaborators, she 3D-printed the crest and nasal passages, effectively reconstructing the dinosaur’s built-in sound system.
Into this model, she added a mechanical larynx that vibrates when air is blown through a mouthpiece, similar to how a trumpet works. The result was a ghostly, otherworldly sound that could shift from whispers to booming calls depending on the breath.
Her early instruments, completed between 2011 and 2013, earned recognition in Austria at a sound art competition. However, there was still a lot of scope for improvement.
Building a choir of dinosaurs
Brown’s instruments were basically 3D-printed dinosaur skulls (based on CT scans of fossils) hooked up to a sound system. When someone speaks, sings, or makes a sound, the system transforms the voices into a dinosaur-like sound.
Later, she improved the instruments using better sound-conducting materials. However, the real leap came after the pandemic, when she teamed up with Cezary Gajewski, a design professor at the University of Alberta.
As health restrictions discouraged people from blowing directly into instruments, Gajewski and Brown reimagined the design. They replaced the mouthpiece with sensors that picked up vibrations from a player’s voice (or subtle movements).
Those signals then go into a digital voice box, which then sends sound waves through the 3D-printed skull. Meanwhile, a camera tracks mouth movements to alter the tone. Moreover, Brown expanded the project’s scientific side.
She built bioacoustic computer models that simulate how living animals create sounds, using equations that describe air pressure changes and vocal folds. She programmed different models based on the syrinx (the vocal organ in birds), including one inspired by doves and another by ravens.
“The syrinx model was chosen due to conclusions of researchers who indicated that the larynx was bird-like and suggested a syrinx-like sound source,” Brown said. This flexible system allows performers to switch between hypotheses of how dinosaurs might have sounded.
Later, more students from SMU joined the Dinosaur Choir as composers, programmers, and performers. Recently, the team won third place at Georgia Tech’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. They have performed original pieces like Anger at the Asteroid as part of the Dinosaur Trio, showing that the project is both science and art in equal measure.
The real voices are different
The Dinosaur Choir is more than a quirky artistic experiment. It challenges long-held assumptions about dinosaur sounds. For instance, instead of the menacing roars popularized by Jurassic Park, the instruments often produce gentler conversation sounds, suggesting a social, communicative side to these animals.
“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,” Brown said.
The project also underscores a key scientific challenge, i.e., we can never know exactly how dinosaurs sounded, but we can explore possibilities through models, reconstructions, and creative experimentation.
Brown hopes to make the 3D printing plans and software open source, allowing choirs of dinosaur skull-instruments to be created everywhere. She also plans to branch out to other species, including the nodosaur, a heavily armored plant-eater with intricate nasal passages.
In the long run, she envisions full orchestras where ancient and modern voices blend, letting audiences experience not just what dinosaurs looked like, but how they might have sounded.
You can read more about Dinosaur Choir here.