Developing harmonic awareness and skills is a crucial goal for every musician, in order to improve expertise in intonation, improvisation, performance, sight singing and memorization. In spite of this, most students have to face these challenge with no clear strategies nor specific tools. During the workshop, we will directly experience several different approaches to chord recognition, from the most common to some unusual ones, evaluating pros and cons of each of them. Participants will be involved in a real Ear training session and will directly experience those strategies, through extemporaneous group singing (one to three voices), body movements according to the chord progressions they hear, melodic lines drawn in the air along with the music.

We will especially focus on those approaches that meet the following criteria:

- fit for use in real time, while the listener is currently hearing / the performer is currently playing. Too many times Ear training is considered just a kind of auditive analysis: of course we pay the highest respect for analysis, but in many performing situations a fast (maybe incomplete) answer provided by Ear training tools could be more desirable than a perfect (but late) one obtained through analysis.

- suitable for a wide variety of music genres and repertoires. Despite the suspicion with which pop and jazz music is sometimes viewed in academic circles, these languages ​​can offer a solid, easy to use and convenient basis for harmonic understanding even to classical musicians, and it is precisely from these repertoires that we will start our work, with the aim of building bridges rather than walls between musicians.