Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra

Courtney Brown

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra is a work for hadrosaur skull instrument, soprano, and audience participation. The dinosaur skull instrument, part of the Dinosaur Choir project, recreates the sound of an extinct hadrosaur, the Corythosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur with a large cranial crest that scientists hypothesize functioned as an acoustic resonator. The skull instrument is 3D printed from fossil scans and built at approximately the scale of the original specimens. It functions as a wind instrument, incorporating a computational syrinx (avian vocal organ), whose parameters are derived from avian biological research and adjusted using Corythosaurus fossil measurements. In performance, the musician’s breath, captured via throat microphone, drives the modelled vocal system. Optical motion capture of the mouth modulates vocal muscle tension in the digital syrinx. Additional parameters are informed by comparative anatomy from birds, alligators, humans, and Corythosaurus inner ear fossils. While science is one way of knowing dinosaurs, this work explores how musical instrument design and performance can also generate knowledge. Like many recent audience-interactive works that blur the boundary between stage and listener, Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra invites the audience into the act of sounding itself. The audience becomes part of this act of reconstruction. Using a QR code, listeners join the piece via a web app and perform eight movements through smartphone-based instruments. These instruments, including cricket, frog, cicada, and dinosaur voices, are created using physically based modeling synthesis. Many are activated through motion capture and gesture; for example, the cricket instrument is played by running one’s finger across the thumb, mimicking stridulation. Alternative versions are provided for devices without motion capture. Together, the audience forms a distributed paleoacoustic soundscape surrounding the hadrosaur instrument and soprano, at times joining the stage performers directly in shared chorus.

Citation

Courtney Brown. 2026. Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20782093 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_music_23,
 abstract = {Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra is a work for hadrosaur skull instrument, soprano, and audience participation. The dinosaur skull instrument, part of the Dinosaur Choir project, recreates the sound of an extinct hadrosaur, the Corythosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur with a large cranial crest that scientists hypothesize functioned as an acoustic resonator. The skull instrument is 3D printed from fossil scans and built at approximately the scale of the original specimens. It functions as a wind instrument, incorporating a computational syrinx (avian vocal organ), whose parameters are derived from avian biological research and adjusted using Corythosaurus fossil measurements. In performance, the musician’s breath, captured via throat microphone, drives the modelled vocal system. Optical motion capture of the mouth modulates vocal muscle tension in the digital syrinx. Additional parameters are informed by comparative anatomy from birds, alligators, humans, and Corythosaurus inner ear fossils. While science is one way of knowing dinosaurs, this work explores how musical instrument design and performance can also generate knowledge. Like many recent audience-interactive works that blur the boundary between stage and listener, Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra invites the audience into the act of sounding itself. The audience becomes part of this act of reconstruction. Using a QR code, listeners join the piece via a web app and perform eight movements through smartphone-based instruments. These instruments, including cricket, frog, cicada, and dinosaur voices, are created using physically based modeling synthesis. Many are activated through motion capture and gesture; for example, the cricket instrument is played by running one’s finger across the thumb, mimicking stridulation. Alternative versions are provided for devices without motion capture. Together, the audience forms a distributed paleoacoustic soundscape surrounding the hadrosaur instrument and soprano, at times joining the stage performers directly in shared chorus.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {23},
 author = {Courtney Brown},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20782093},
 editor = {Lia Mice and Nicole Robson and Tara Pattenden},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Live Performance},
 numpages = {6},
 pages = {94--99},
 presentation-video = {https://vimeo.com/1164134260?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci},
 title = {Dinosaur Choir & the Insect Orchestra},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_music_23.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}