Music-Making and the Flow of Aerosols
hubie writes:
It was 2020, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, like so many cultural institutions, had suspended performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through P.J. Brennan, chief medical officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the Orchestra sought expertise to help understand whether its musicians could return to playing in a safe physical arrangement that would minimize the chances of exposing one another, or their audiences, to SARS-CoV-2.
"The Orchestra director didn't want the musicians to be far apart; they needed to be close together to produce the best sound," says Arratia, of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. "And yet, if they needed to be separated with plexiglass, that also posed a problem." The musicians reported problems hearing one another and poor sightlines with plexiglass dividers. "The challenge was, how can we get away from this to the point where they can play unobstructed but still safely," Arratia says.
Now, in a publication in Physics of Fluids, Arratia, Jerolmack, and colleagues report on their findings, which suggest the aerosols musicians produce dissipate within about six feet. The results not only informed the arrangement of the Philadelphia Orchestra as they resumed performances in the summer of 2020 but also laid the groundwork for how other musical groups might think about safely gathering and playing.
[...] Based on their observations, the aerosols produced by these "mini-concerts" dissipated, settling into the flow of the background air draft, within about 2 meters, or 6 feet-reassuringly similar, the researchers say, to what has been measured for ordinary speaking or breathing. Only flute and trombone-generated aerosols traveled beyond that distance, for the flute perhaps because the air travels over the instrument instead of the instrument acting like a mask to prevent the spread of aerosols.
[...] "Now you have something to work with for potential future concerns, maybe an outbreak of influenza or something like that," says Arratia. "You can use our findings about flow, plug in your numbers about infectiousness and viral loads, and adapt it to understand risk.
Journal Reference:
Quentin Brosseau, Ranjiangshang Ran, Ian Graham, et al., Flow and aerosol dispersion from wind musical instruments [open], Physics of Fluids, 2022. DOI: 10.1063/5.0098273
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