Subharchord

In Germany, new music was composed and experiments conducted on electronic equipment that often came originally from physics labs or radio.

For example, at the Studio for Electronic Music at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, many new works were written by composers such as Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Gottfried Michael Koenig.

Experiments with musical structures and technical innovations were also taking place in studios in Milan, Rome, Eindhoven, Brussels, Gravesano, and New York.

These innovations in music, as well as the use of new electronic sources of sound, were followed with great interest in East Berlin, where the GDR wished to lead in the competitive struggle between the two German states.

In around 1960, technical experts at the Labor für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme (English: Laboratory for Problems at the Acoustics/Music Interface) began constructing a sound-generating device, which would be a compact sound lab and centerpiece of an electronic music studio, to give East German composers an instrument to work with that was technologically superior to the equipment available in the Western world.

The Subharchord has a keyboard and is played like an organ, whereas the Mixturtrautonium's manual is a resistor wire over a metal plate, which is pressed at various points to create sound, like a ribbon-controller.

[citation needed] Miersch's published his discovery in a four-part series in the German magazine Keyboards in 2003, and built a website to promote the Subharchord to a wider audience.