UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
As the COVID-19 pandemic kept bands and choirs from performing, a multi-institutional team set out to determine how to reduce the risk of airborne transmission during live musical performances. Their findings helped shape guidelines used by many high school bands and ensembles as performers returned to the stage.
The paper describing the work, “Measurements and Simulations of Aerosol Released while Singing and Playing Wind Instruments,” was selected as one of the winners of the 2021–22 Best Paper awards of the journal ACS Environmental Au. Srebric is a co-author with Donald K. Milton of the UMD School of Public Health. The lead authors are Tehya Stockman and Shelly Miller of the University of Colorado Boulder, and UMD associate research professor Shengwei Zhu and doctoral student Lingzhe Wang also contributed.
Volunteer musicians, mostly undergraduate and graduate students in wind instruments and voice, took part in aerosol tests set up at Colorado and at City@UMD. The team combined these measurements with flow visualization and computational fluid dynamics. Musical performance produced highly directional aerosol plumes that varied with the room and the instrument; a clarinet, for example, produced concentrations similar to singing.
The College Band Directors National Association and the National Federation of State High School Associations commissioned the study, seeing it as essential to bringing live bands and orchestras back to the nation’s schools.
“Live music faced an existential threat as a result of the pandemic,” Srebric said. “To ensure that musical and theatrical performances could return, in a way that was safe for all involved, we needed to understand the patterns of airborne transmission more precisely.”
The value of the work reaches beyond COVID-19, she added: “Airborne transmission of infectious diseases is a long-term problem. Our findings, and the best practices they support, will help us in our response to other public health challenges that may arise in the future.”