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During her road trip to start graduate school at Arizona State University, East Coast native Courtney Brown stopped at a dinosaur museum in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Inside, she pressed a button at a sound exhibit to hear the simulated call of Parasaurolophus, a type of duck-billed dinosaur. The sound resonated with her.

“That was my favorite part of the exhibit,” Brown said. “But I also thought that the experience could be improved upon in a lot of ways.”  

Not long after that, the candidate for an Interdisciplinary Media and Performance Doctorate of Musical Arts did what any intellectually curious sound artist would do: She set about improving on the concept of a dinosaur skull that could make the noise of the dinosaur.

“I’d been doing new musical interfaces for a while, since 2006 to 2007,” said Brown, who earned her master’s degree in electroacoustic music at Dartmouth College. “I immediately thought of how that would go into my research. I wanted to have the feeling of being a dinosaur, I guess, and have it be this physical sensation … like being the dinosaur’s lungs.”

In ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Brown went to work with her adviser, Garth Paine Paine holds a joint appointment as associate professor in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and the School of Music. , and later with Sharif Razzaque, her peer from the graduate computer science program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

They helped to create the prototype for a re-created skull of a Corythosaurus, another type of lambeosaurine hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) — a cousin to the Parasaurolophus she’d encountered in New Mexico. The duck-billed dinosaurs were known for their head crests, through which they made their trumpet-like calls.

With her dual background in music and computer science, particularly with her experience in software development, Brown was able to build on her varied experience and hone her talent.

Corythosaurus 3-D models from CT scans They were were shared by by Lawrence Witmer at Ohio University. provided the base for the skull, which was constructed with foam, coated in polyurea and pieced together with epoxy. The nasal passages were 3-D printed, along with the resonant passages of the interior of the dinosaur’s skull. Brown designed and built the larynx first, and then she and Razzaque used a Shopbot — a Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machine — to fabricate the skull.

Interestingly, the dinosaur skull crafted by Brown is an acoustic instrument.

“That was a really important aesthetic point for me,” Brown said, noting that she could have taken a hybrid/digital approach, but she was “interested in the poetry of the physical.”

To make the sound, people blow into a tube that pushes air through the skull to produce the extinct creature's call.

“I say this as somebody deeply involved in writing software, and I’ve been doing computer music for a really long time. But sometimes, as an engineer, you have to think, ‘What’s the best solution?’ And honestly, the easiest solution might have been having some kind of sensor that people blow into to create the noise, or somehow creating this larynx. I just wasn’t interested in that. I felt like it had to be physical.”

In her research, Brown passionately pursued the integrity of the Corythosaurus’ physical vocal mechanism. The obvious challenge, after 77 million years, was the lack of soft-tissue remains. From only the CT scan of the skull and dedicated, yet peripheral, research into the dinosaur’s cranial structural features, Brown had to divine an idea of the dinosaur’s physical larynges.  

“I did all this research. I was talking to [Ohio University's] Lawrence Witmer, and I asked, ‘So what do we know about Corythosaurus larynges?’ And he said, ‘We know nothing!’ That was a big blow,” Brown said. “I couldn’t absorb it. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something!’ Because I wanted it to be exact. It was about accepting the role of the imagination, which, in fact, is what makes it beautiful, in a way.

“When you blow into the skull, you can feel it in your lungs coming back to you, so there’s this physical sensation that’s just there. The whole point of the project is to give this physicality to the dinosaur sound. It becomes really important, I think.”

Paine emphasized this point, as well. “You can kind of embody the dinosaur by blowing into it, and then you can change the pitch by tightening and loosening the larynx,” he said. “Then those chambers all resonate like they would have done in the dinosaur.”

In August, her research project “Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls” landed Brown an honorary mention in the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica competition, one of the world's most prestigious awards for media arts. Her project was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival, drawing more than a thousand visitors eager to make the skull sing by breathing into it. The Corythosaurus skull prototype was displayed as an interactive sound exhibit.

“Only a small number of people who got honorable mentions was selected to come to Ars Electronica and exhibit their work at the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, a very prestigious venue,” Paine said.

Brown was flown to the festival and hosted for two weeks while she exhibited the dinosaur in the Ars Electronica museum.

“She also did a concert,” Paine said. “That’s extraordinary exposure for her on the international stage at the highest possible level.”

Brown says that without the transdisciplinary opportunities available to her in ASU's School of Arts, Media + Engineering facilities, the project never would have happened. 

“I immediately thought, ‘Oh! There’s a fabrication lab here!’ Whereas if I was in a computer music department, that wouldn’t be something I’d think about. I saw the variety of activities going on here in AME, and we thought, ‘OK, we can do this!’ I learned a lot about digital fabrication. It’s not magic. It’s a lot of work.”

Paine said all of that work resulted in the recognition Brown received at the Ars Electronica festival.

“It’s a really good kind of transdisciplinary point at which these things come together. So nobody in the music school could do this … probably nobody else in AME would think about doing it … but when you get somebody who brings those things together, then you come up with these points of exploration that are kind of unique that people in those individual disciplines wouldn’t come up with.”

Brown’s work has already generated interest from academics, musicians and even from dinosaur scientists and natural history museums.

“Her work opens up all this outreach potential, and the potential for the artists to lead the scientific inquiry, to lead the engagement and really improvise,” Paine said.

Written by Kristi Garboushian School of Arts, Media + Engineering 480-727-1161, kristi.garboushian@asu.edu

On the Downtown Phoenix campus, ASU offers students academic and urban lifestyles in the heart of Arizona's capital. With more than 11,500 enrolled students, the campus offers a wide variety of schools and colleges, including nursing, journalism, future of innovation, health solutions, letters and sciences, public service, teaching and soon the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.Explore ASU's ot...

On the Downtown Phoenix campus, ASU offers students academic and urban lifestyles in the heart of Arizona's capital. With more than 11,500 enrolled students, the campus offers a wide variety of schools and colleges, including nursing, journalism, future of innovation, health solutions, letters and sciences, public service, teaching and soon the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

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