Lucio

The Musician

Lúcio Correia dos Santos, known simply as Lucio, is a support character that has the option to heal or give a speed boost to teammates within a certain radius. Lucio’s primary weapon is his sonic amplifier, a handheld speaker that shoots bursts of sound which cause damage upon impact with an enemy, similarly to a gun. He has three active abilities, soundwave, crossfade and amp it up. Soundwave causes Lucio to fire a large spread shot that deals little damage, but has a large knockback scalar. Crossfade allows Lucio to switch between healing teammates and giving them a speed boost. Amp it up causes Lucio’s radius affect to be amplified, giving himself and teammates faster healing or even more speed, for a short interval of time. Lucio also has the passive ability of being able to wall-ride. This is often used for mobility purposes, as it increases his speed, and gives him a burst of speed when leaping off the wall he is riding. Lucio’s ultimate, sound barrier, causes him to slam his sonic amplifier into the ground, giving any teammates within a 30 metre radius a temporary shield that rapidly diminishes. This ultimate is most useful for intense fights or to counteract against the enemy team using a damage ultimate.

The Physics

In order to determine how sound can cause physical damage to a person, such as in the case of Lucio, the first thing that must be found is an object of reference to compare the damage to. A good comparison is to a 9 mm bullet, as it has the ability to cause significant damage to a person if hit. A 9 mm bullet, after being fired, has a kinetic energy of 500 joules, so the sound energy will also be 500 joules. Loudness is measured in decibels, which is equivalent to watts, or joules per second. Since it can be presumed that all the energy is delivered over one second, the sound wave would be 500 watts. Using a decibel formula, the 500 watts is found to be a loudness of 270 dB. To put into perspective the magnitude of this sound coming out of a small hand-held speaker like Lucio’s, it can be compared to a speaker created by the European Space Agency that is capable of producing sounds of 154 dB, however, the speaker is about the size of a car. The energy required to make a 270 dB sound is more than that of a nuclear explosion, since the sonic boom created in the detonation of a nuclear bomb is about 230 dB. It would be almost impossible for Lucio’s sonic amplifier to produce this sound without killing everyone near him, and himself either due to the release in energy or the knockback of the speaker.