“If the harmony has not changed, keep the pedal down” is only a provisional beginner’s rule. The damper pedal lifts all the dampers, allowing earlier sounds to decay and untouched strings to resonate. Even when the left hand remains within one chord for a whole bar, each repeated bass note can pile a fresh attack on top of the old resonance. The chord label has not changed, yet the sound may already have lost its outline.
Try one bar of an accompaniment built from a bass octave and upper chords. First hold the pedal for the whole bar; then clear it quickly whenever the bass returns. The second version is not automatically better, but the comparison makes useful questions audible. Does each bass note still have a new beginning? Are inner voices being covered by accumulated resonance? Has the melody receded? Yamaha’s pedalling guidance likewise treats listening as the basis for deciding how much pedal to use, while acoustic research shows that the sustain pedal changes overtone decay and resonance in ways that are not identical across the keyboard.
Pedal plans therefore cannot follow chord symbols mechanically. At a quick tempo, with a light touch and in a dry room, one pedal may last longer. With a weighty bass, a slow tempo or a reverberant space, the pedal may need a full or partial refresh even though the harmony remains unchanged. The point is simple: the pedal connects the sound that actually exists, not the harmonic label on the page.
https://hub.yamaha.com/music-educators/instruments/piano/piano-pedagogy-pedaling/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17927438/
When organising practice with <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a>, you can treat “compare unchanged and refreshed pedal within one harmony” as a brief listening experiment rather than prescribing one foot action in advance.
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