Courtney Brown is an interactive sound artist, Argentine tango dancer, and computer music researcher. She is a doctoral candidate in Digital Media and Performance at Arizona State University, and a graduate of Dartmouth’s Electroacoustic Master’s Program. A former Fulbright Fellow, she developed interactive Argentine tango dance during her residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This on-going project gives dancers agency over music, their movements driving real-time musical composition within an Argentine tango social dance context.

Through the physical act of creating sound, her works are a catalyst for investigating and altering embodied experience. Her continuing project, ‘Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls’, allows both gallery visitors and musical performers to give voice to an extinct lambeosaurine hadrosaur. Users know the dinosaur through the controlled exhalation of their breath, how the compression of the lungs leads to a roar or a whisper. Her work, ‘Every Night I Lose Control’, a solo cabaret act of interactive works designed for inevitable performer failure and loss of musical agency, explores fractured states of embodiment, bodily limitations, and the aesthetics of losing control. Mirroring the intimate relationship between musician and instrument, her use of musical interface demands vulnerability of the part of the participant or performer.