A listening practice
Begin with your ears.
You do not need to agree with every chord suggestion. The evidence is there to help you ask better musical questions.
Find the foundation.
Listen for the bass pitch that seems to hold the passage together. Does it stay while the harmony above changes? A pedal point can support several different colours without establishing a new tonal centre.
Hear the upper colour.
Listen again for the notes and shapes above that foundation. The upper pitch collection and candidate chords offer competing readings. They do not establish the exact manual voicing or a complete inversion.
Follow the direction.
Listen beyond an individual chord. What prepares the arrival? Where does a phrase settle? A tonal-profile candidate is a clue to context; a musical conclusion needs the phrase, bass and cadence.
Try it at a keyboard.
Reconstruct a short moment. Check the bass and octave, the upper notes you can hear, and whether the proposed harmony makes musical sense. A useful reduction can illuminate a device even when the original texture remains uncertain.
How to read a study.
Machine readings are estimates from recorded sound. Organ overtones, mixtures and reverberation can confuse them. Relative fits compare candidate agreement; they are not confidence probabilities.
Musician observations are separately credited listening judgments. Provisional means uncertainty remains. Synthetic example identifies an exercise with known source harmony, not a real organist?s performance.
A harmonic reduction explains the architecture. A transcription attempts to represent the performed notes. They should be labeled distinctly.