This Crazy Instrument Lets Us Hear How Dinosaurs Might Have Sounded

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. “I found some of these models in literature and put them into code based on the most recent research.”

In particular, Brown was inspired by a paper looking into an ankylosaur larynx, only recently discovered in 2023. It led researchers to hypothesize that non-avian dinosaurs could have had a syrinx more like a bird (which is located in the chest), and not the larynx of mammals and crocodiles (which is located in the throat), as first thought.