Dinosaurs didn’t roar the way Hollywood likes to pretend. Their voices were stranger, more guttural, closer to foghorns, booms, and goose calls than cinematic screeches. Now, an art project is trying to bring those sounds back to life with instruments modeled after actual fossils.
The work, titled Dinosaur Choir, is a collaboration between artist and musician Courtney Brown and designer Cezary Gajewski. Their lineup begins with Corythosaurus, the duck-billed dinosaur whose strange headgear doubled as an acoustic system. Air moving through its hollow crest probably produced sounds closer to brass notes than roars.
Using CT scans, the team 3D-printed the crest and outfitted it with electronics to mimic how air might have moved through the dinosaur’s head. The sound that came out was deep and unsettling—something between a horn and a foghorn—and it won them recognition at the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.
This Art Project Uses Unusual Instruments to Mimic Accurate Dinosaur Sounds
When someone breathes into the replica, sensors capture the airflow and send it through a digital voice box. That signal then resonates inside the 3D-printed crest, which amplifies it into long, hollow tones. It’s equal parts scientific demo and art performance.
Brown, who’s also a musician, says her vision is an entire dinosaur orchestra. An ankylosaur is next on the list, since fossils suggest the armored tank of a dinosaur had a surprisingly birdlike voice box. Add a few more species, and she could recreate the once very-real soundscape of the earth.
Projects like this demonstrate the absence of dinosaur sounds in our understanding of them. We know what they looked like, how they moved, even what they ate. Their voices have always been a blank. Dinosaur Choir fills that silence with something playable.
The project also shows how science and art can intersect in strange but effective ways. It’s not a laboratory reconstruction or a CGI fantasy, but something you can stand in front of and hear. Dinosaurs are long gone, yet a room full of people can still feel their calls vibrating through 3D-printed skulls.
That’s as close to a prehistoric soundscape as we’re likely to get—until we get those real-life cloned dinosaurs walking around.
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