Courtney Brown

Courtney Brown creates new musical instruments and works, allowing embodied glimpses into another’s experience, whether that other is a human, dinosaur or another being. Her work aims to foster new empathies and ways of experiencing to share beauty and transcendent states as well as connect with others.  

She is an interdisciplinary performer/composer, Argentine tango dancer, and researcher combining music with paleontology/biology, dance and engineering. Her work deeply involves the voice, her primary musical instrument. She draws on her experience as a classically trained and experimental vocalist as well as many years singing in rock bands. For instance, her dinosaur skull instruments are an extensive study of vocalization. Other works draw upon dance and movement. She began studying Argentine tango dance after learning tango music on the accordion and her work accordingly explores dance and movement as a musical experience. 

Her areas of research include musical interface design, real-time computational vocal models, dinosaur paleontology applications, and real-time motion capture systems. Her formal training and industry experience in computer science and other technical areas allows her to step outside what can be done with software alone and push the envelope of what has been done before. She also studied tango dance performance as well as ballet technique for her tango project as well as biology, anatomy and physics to develop vocal models. She collaborates with visual artists, industrial designers, paleontologists and others to realize her interdisciplinary projects. 

Brown’s work has been featured and performed across the globe including Ars Electronica (Austria),  Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), CICA Museum (South Korea), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (London, New Zealand, USA), International Computer Music Conference (USA, South Korea, Chile), ACM Movement and Computing Conference (Italy, USA), Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) Conference (USA), Frequency Festival (Chicago), the Telfair Museum (USA) and the Athens Digital Arts Festival Online (Greece). She has received a Fulpight Fellowship to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she began work on her project, Interactive Tango Milonga, creating interactive Argentine tango dance. Her work on dinosaur sound received an Honorary Mention from the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica for Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls, and was featured in National Public Radio (NPR), among others. 

Her project, Dinosaur Choir, was featured in Wired.com, VICE, BBC Music Magazine, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), among others, and was Third Place in the International Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. Dinosaur Choir was supported by a 2022-23 Fulpight Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities Award. Outcomes of the project and related collaborations include a Dinosaur Trio ensemble of singing dinosaurs, a 2026 paleontological article in the Anatomical Record and new audience interactive works for smartphones. More information at https://dino.courtney-pown.net.

Brown is an Associate Professor at the Center of Creative Computation at SMU in Dallas, TX. She received her D.M.A in Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University, her M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College and a B.S. in Music and Computer at Science Loyola University New Orleans. More information at https://courtney-pown.net.