How to use numbers in music 

Totally agree. Rare teaching ability - a natural.

btw. There is an iOs app called - Functional Ear Trainer - Is this the basis of your insights and your development, Ted?

I want to recommend a RU-vid channel to analyse how Jimmy Strums the piano. It’s called Fakerating

This is a great question! If you're already comfy with solfege, the road to identifying chords by ear is going to be relatively easy. Once you ID the bass note of a chord, you can start with one or two educated guesses for the rest of the chord and test them on your instrument. In terms of what name you give them... compared to the challenge of learning to hear these things, switching out one name for the other won't be too hard. You already know the names of the numbers 1-7, and you can definitely sing them (they're all one syllable except for seven which can be replace with "sev" if you want.) The point of the name is just to communicate with other musicians about what's going on. For the sake of communication you'll be more likely to be understood if you say "ii-V-I" than "re-so-do" when talking about chords. But frankly, it's a lot more important that you can hear and play the progression than that you can talk about it :) so whatever works for you! Personally I never got that great with the solfege syllables, and it hasn't mattered. If you can ID the scale degrees and chord functions in your head and play them on your instrument nobody will care what you call them.

@@pianofluency Thanks for the detailed response. I'll try and see if I can sing in numbers!

Numbers are much more helpful for me when analyzing intervals, chords and harmonic progressions.

There are some concepts that mustn't be shown in a shorter way. Once we get a quality explanation...