Abstract:
Preparation of Indian musical flutes of professional grade is quite a time consuming and mundane task. As musical applications require significantly higher level of accuracy and the physical phenomena involved are exceptionally complicated, locating the six finger holes becomes a riddle. Although there are some softwares available for this purpose but they are not accurate enough. So, this task of locating the holes in the flute for perfect tuning depends on the experience of the flute maker who by manual iterations completes it. Due to the manual effort and expertise required for this process, the cost of this instrument is claimed to be as high as ₹21000. It is not known whether this much effort is really required or it just done because everybody is traditionally doing it. After purchasing a flute at this high price, suppose a flutist wants to play it but finds out that the song to be accompanied is having a scale different than scale of the flute. At this moment, he/she can decide to sit quietly not playing the flute. Or he/she can try playing the song on the same flute searching for the hidden half notes by closing one of the holes half way but it is not an easy task to play so many half notes at the tempo of the song. Or rather he/she can consider buying a set of 12 flutes and choose one flute according to the scale of the song. For a musician this struggle of selecting a flute of proper scale to play on a particular performance is a usual thing but an engineer‟s mind starts to search for solutions as soon as a problem is tackled. So, a need was felt to address this problem. Experiments were done to understand the effect of various design parameters. Through this dissertation, an attempt is made to identify various variables affecting flute‟s Ease of playing, designing and manufacturing
