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. 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 her younger 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 work has been featured and performed across the globe including Ars Electronica (Austria), National Public Radio (NPR), Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), CICA Museum (South Korea), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 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 Fulbright Fellowship to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she began work on her ongoing project, Interactive Tango Milonga, creating interactive Argentine tango dance. Her work on dinosaur sound has received an Honorary Mention from the 2015 Prix Ars Electronica for Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls, among others. She was the 2022-23 Fulbright Canada Research Chair of Arts and Humanities, pursuing her project, Dinosaur Choir and collaborating with the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts and Dinosaur Paleontology Lab. More information on her dinosaur work can be found at https://dino.courtney-brown.net.
She is an Assistant Professor at the Center of Creative Computation at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. She holds degrees in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance (DMA) from Arizona State University, in Electroacoustic Music (MA) from Dartmouth College, and in Music and Computer Science (BS) from Loyola University New Orleans.
For additional documentation, musical experiments and works-in-progress, check out my vimeo site.
For information and pricing on commissions, exhibition, scores, and licensing as well as for press inquiries, please contact me using the email below.
Email: browncd [at] smu [dot] edu