Review: Singing while wearing a Flo Mask

[terriko]

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the Flo Mask and mentioned that I wasn’t sure how well it would work for singing. Well, Wednesday Sept 11 was my first choir rehearsal for the fall season and I brought it and… it actually worked out pretty well!

Image Description: Terri, a mixed race woman, is standing near the edge of a parking lot outside. She has a Flo Mask around her neck over top of a hand knitted lace scarf, is wearing glasses, and is holding a black choir music folder.

I had brought a spare disposable mask as backup, but I wound up leaving the Flow Mask on for the whole rehearsal. The seal *did* pop once or twice so it’s absolutely not perfect, but I think that was happening with the disposable masks I was using before as well it just wasn’t quite as obvious. So it’s possibly not significantly worse from a health and safety perspective, but it was definitely more distracting. The couple of times I noticed it was while I was singing with my mouth in certain positions, so I was probably ejecting more unfiltered air than I would have liked, but only for a second or less before my jaw moved and the seal went back into place. I didn’t have to touch the mask to fix it; it went back with regular movement.

I’m not sure if it’s going to affect the way I sing overall if I have that feedback. Will I start holding my jaw differently? I think probably not, especially as I intend to practice at home without the mask, but I definitely need more than one rehearsal to figure that out.

I was using an “everyday filter” (the less strong of the two filters available for this mask). It’s generally a little bit easier to breathe in than my previous disposable 3M N95 masks, so it was not a surprise that it was also easier to sing in. Last year, the first rehearsal with the disposable mask left me feeling pretty out of breath and while I wasn’t gasping or feeling dizzy, I could barely last 4 bars of singing before I needed a breath. This year, I could manage most phrases but was still a little out of breath at the end of some — that’s actually about normal for me at the beginning of the season because I’m out of practice.

So overall, I’d say this mask isn’t perfect for singing, but it’s probably good enough! I’ll be wearing it for the next few rehearsals and I’ll see how I feel about it with some more practice, but I’m actually hopeful that I’ll be able to use it for most rehearsals this season.

(I’m also hopeful that I won’t get sick so often this season, but we’ll see how that works out in practice. Kiddo is back in school, but this year we didn’t get infected by my in-laws in August so hopefully our immune systems are all in better shape and I won’t have to worry so much about bringing public school diseases to my choir and the seniors’ homes where we sing for the holidays!)