Read on to discover that like birds, dinosaurs had syrinxes, enabling them to sing...
The Dinosaur Choir... a device that reveals dinosaurs could sing
Come and join a dinosaur choir! That’s an invitation that any music-lover would surely want to take up: who could give up the chance to sit next to a velociraptor or T-Rex and put together a Messiah from scratch? Which, admittedly, might get rather messy if the animals got bored with the Hallelujah Chorus and determined to do what they do best and started to devour their fellow singers.
Thankfully, that’s not what musician and scientist Courtney Brown has dreamt up in her new instrument, the Dinosaur Choir – and not only because there are no Jurassic Park-style DNA resurrections in sight. It’s also because the animal whose skull it is based upon is Corythosaurus, a species of ‘lambeosaurine hadrosaur’ that only ate plants and the occasional crustacean, despite growing to around nine metres in length, and which lived in what’s now Canada c.75 million years ago. Phew.
Dinosaurs didn't roar... they sighed and wailed
Brown’s instrument is a blood-red 3D-printed skull of the Corythosaurus, nearly a metre long, and including its extravagant crest, which paleontologists think was designed to resonate its vocalisations and give them their species-unique soundworld. Thanks to her work, all we have to do to become dinosaur performers is blow into a microphone and computers inside the skull analyse our vocal technique, translating human breathing and singing into a chorus of Corythosauri.
And it’s shocking and startling to hear how the dinosaurs might actually have sounded – like a wailing, sighing and singing. It’s a soundworld of uncanny resonance and strangeness, coming from the depths of the lowest possible register – and rescued from the abyss of time, giving a spinetingling sensation of encountering voices that haven’t been heard since the late Cretaceous.
Like birds, dinosaurs had syrinxes (not larynxes) and could sing
And that’s where Jurassic Park comes in. The revelation of the Dinosaur Choir is that dinosaurs – lambeosaurine hadrosaurs, at least – didn’t roar or scream as they always do in the movies. Because dinosaurs produced their vocal sounds through bird-like syrinxes rather than mammalian larynxes, the sounds of prehistory are totally unlike the ones that have been dreamt up by Hollywood directors and composers over the decades.
Imagine watching any dino-movie in which the terrifying raptors wailed and sang instead of roared with the one-dimensional scary noises that they usually do. We would have sympathy for the saurians in a way that never normally happens, and we’d hear a real choir of dinosaurs as the species intermingled with each other to make a truly Jurassic soundscape.
More dinosaur voices are on the way...
That’s Courtney Brown and her fellow creators’ dream too, to extend the Dinosaur Choir to other species – and to as many human performers as possible. Corythosaurus is only the start. The Carnival of the Carnivorous Prehistoric Animals is coming to a concert hall near you soon. Be afraid. Be very afraid…
