October 20, 2021
7:00–8:00 pm MST

Opening event hosted by the Sound Studies Institute

Becoming a Hadrosaur: Musical Instruments as a Window into Natural History

Presented by
Courtney Brown

Streaming live via soundstudies.ca/livestream

Lambeosaurine hadrosaurs are duck-billed dinosaurs known for their large head crests. Researchers hypothesize these large crests were resonators for vocal calls. My works Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls and Dinosaur Choir bring these calls to life as singing dinosaur musical instruments. Musicians and participants give voice to these dinosaur instruments by blowing into a mouthpiece, exciting a larynx mechanism and resonating the sound through the dinosaur’s nasal cavities and skull. In a sense, they fleetingly experience being a dinosaur. In doing so, they and this work open up new ways of thinking and research about the ancient past and how it informs our present. While science is one way of knowing the world, my work explores how a musical instrument can also produce knowledge.

Courtney Brown is a composer/performer, software developer, and tango dancer. She creates new musical interfaces in which the act of creating sound is transformative in some way. People become dinosaurs by blowing into a hadrosaur skull, creating their own roar. Social dancers become musical ensembles. Her work has been featured and performed in North America, Europe, and Asia including Ars Electronica (Austria), National Public Radio (NPR), Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), CICA Museum (Korea), New Interfaces for Musical Expression/BEAM Festival (London), ACM Movement and Computing Conference (Italy), the Telfair Museum (Savannah, Georgia). She received her D.M.A in Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University and her M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Center of Creative Computation, Southern Methodist University.