Modeling aerosol flow for singing and brass instruments

Abstract

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Washington State, a choir rehearsal resulted in most of the participants contracting the virus during the rehearsal. More importantly, as people consider restarting education programs, the question of safely rehearsing choirs, bands, and symphonies needs to be addressed. Guidelines based on talking, sneezing, or coughing are insufficient to provide appropriate guidance for safe environments for collective singing or instrument performance. This paper reports our initial efforts to explore the question of aerosol movement through the air for some special cases of musical performance. We explored using open-source modeling software designed to numerically solve differential equations of motion: FEniCS and OpenFOAM. We will discuss modifying Open-source CFD Software to model the airflow and resulting aerosol spray from a singing human voice. We will also discuss our progress in applying these methods to the case of a brass instrument where the mixture is traveling through a tube of various lengths.