A violin player tries out Scalebook at London's Music Education Expo. [Photo by Cecily Liu/chinadaily.com.cn]

Known as Scalebook, the application gives students instructions on music scales, listens to their practice and gives them feedback just as a live tutor would. It builds on the success of Playnote's signature application Auralbook, which was launched in 2012 and already registered 300,000 downloads worldwide.

"Central to our firm's ideology is the belief that learning music should have no barrier, and should not depend on the availability of good tutors, so we have created artificial intelligence to do the task," said Eric Yung, founder of Playnote.

Music scales are sets of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. Scales are a compulsory component for music exams like the UK-based ABRSM (Associated Board of Royal School of Music), hence scale practice is of vital importance to all music students setting exams, regardless of their instrument.

The application, developed for the iPad, shows students a new scale just like a live exam environment, requires the student to repeat in an exact fashion, and immediately shows them the score by displaying what the student played right next to what they were asked to play.

The feedback is so precise that slight differences in speed, sharpness or flatness of a note, and missing or extra notes, are all immediately observable to the student. This is accompanied by voice commentary, available in Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

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