Every year, Apple hosts the prestigious Apple Design Awards, celebrating 12 best-in-class apps and games from developers around the globe. Six new award categories have recognised developers around the world for innovation, visual and graphics, interaction, delight and fun, inclusivity, and social impact.

Taking home the Innovation award is NaadSadhana (also winning in this category is the game League of Legends: Wild Rift from the US), the app from Pune-based Sandeep Ranade. It helps musicians of all genres and any expertise perform and publish their music without boundaries. After first finding its tune as an app for practicing Indian classical singing, NaadSadhana has expanded to support seven different genres of music. And with the help of artificial intelligence and Core ML, the app listens as a singer improvises a vocal line, provides instant feedback on the accuracy of notes, and generates a backing track to match, all in real time.

Sandeep Ranade Picture: The Telegraph

A few months ago, Ranade shared with us his journey with the app. “I have been learning music for a very long time and I have been teaching music for 19 years now. During this time I realised that what the gurukul system of teaching got right and it is something we are losing out on now. Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds but the same technology is taking us away from the true musicality that the gurukul system endowed on its students. In the gurukul system, one would go and stay with the guru and you would be taught eight or 10 hours a day and you would be in the presence of the highest quality of teaching and music.... There was rarely a chance to learn anything incorrect.”

But then, many students meet the teacher only perhaps once a week. “That is when the idea came to me… for a tuner kind of an app, which is also visual. I started putting together an app and found out that vocal analysis is notoriously difficult.”