It may well be a psycosomatic response, but I find in situations where I must be quiet and still, I frequently end up needing to cough. My “concert prep” has long included having a water bottle to the specification allowed by the venue I’m going to.
It was interesting to me to discover – after concerts restarted – that keeping masked with a kn95 really helps me in not becoming phlegmmy and needing to cough. So I surmise that the “twice as often” result is really that the dense seating in a concert hall means that the air-quality is so different from “normal” with odors, fragrances, and dust so that people’s mucos/phlegm production is on overdrive – and that this is not in any way voluntary (other than the choice to go to a public event in the first place.)
OTOH, some venues are known for rude audiences where you’ll get lots of coughing when there’s an ‘unusual’ interpretation in the artist’s performance, or less than stallar quality (even famous people have bad days), or when ‘modern’ classical music is played.
The “study” (working paper) that this article seems to be referring to has two references as the source of their " 0.025 times per minute" statistic for frequency of coughing in concerts:
Schulz, Alexander, 2005, Husten und Auswurf. Presentation at the „Patientenkongress der Deutschen Lungenstiftung“. Hannover, October 1, 2005
Loudon, Robert G., 1967, Cough in Health and Disease. Current Research in Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease. In: Proceedings of the 10th Aspen Emphysema Conference.
I’d find it interesting to know what hall and what repertoire were measured, as a clue to whether we’d expect coughing as a show of disappreciation in that value.
