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The Subharchord is a synthesizer featuring subharmonic synthesis. It was developed in the mid-20th century by technicians in the German Democratic Republic.
The first fully electronic compositions were written in Germany in the 1950s,[ citation needed ] influenced by musique concrète. In Germany, new music was composed and experiments conducted on electronic equipment that often came originally from physics labs or radio. Development in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west differed considerably, as each state defined its own cultural policy.
One result was that young artists and musicians, who saw themselves as the avant-garde, were valued and tolerated differently in the two states; it was easier for musicians in the West to remain independent and experiment without interference. 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. The publications that came out of the WDR studio found an international audience. 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 device utilized the nascent technology of microelectronics, and was based on the mixing of so-called subharmonic sounds. In this respect it was inspired by the Trautonium, a German invention from the 1930s.
A further development of the Trautonium was developed separately by Oskar Sala, called the Mixturtrautonium, a machine used to create the menacing sound of the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds . Unlike all the other electronic instruments in use, the Mixtur-trautonium used subharmonic mixtures to generate sound. The sounds produced by conventional instruments and in the natural world are a combination of a fundamental with a series of harmonic overtones above it. Subharmonic sounds are produced by dividing the fundamental frequency, resulting in subharmonics, or "undertones", which only exist naturally in bells and steel plates, and differ from the sounds produced conventionally by synthesizers and software programmes for electronic music. Sala died without anyone else ever having learned to play the instrument he had built.
In 2000, while researching the history of electronic music instruments, Berlin artist and musician Manfred Miersch discovered the "Subharchord", another instrument which, like the Trautonium, produces subharmonic sounds. This instrument was invented in the GDR under difficult technical conditions, and differs from the Mixturtrautonium in key respects. 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. In addition, the Subharchord possesses considerably more possibilities than the Mixturtrautonium for generating and manipulating sounds.[ 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. One of the surviving instruments has now been restored.
Like its West German counterpart, the Trautonium, the East German Subharchord was used in several film soundtracks. Karl-Ernst Sasse , former conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the DEFA film studio, worked with the subharchord in Dresden on the soundtracks of science fiction films including Signale. The subharchord was also used for many of DEFA's cartoons.
A digital synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to make musical sounds. This in contrast to older analog synthesizers, which produce music using analog electronics, and samplers, which play back digital recordings of acoustic, electric, or electronic instruments. Some digital synthesizers emulate analog synthesizers; others include sampling capability in addition to digital synthesis.
Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and the electric guitar.
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
Digital music technology encompasses digital instruments, computers, electronic effects units, software, or digital audio equipment by a performer, composer, sound engineer, DJ, or record producer to produce, perform or record music. The term refers to electronic devices, instruments, computer hardware, and software used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis, and editing of music.
An analogsynthesizer is a synthesizer that uses analog circuits and analog signals to generate sound electronically.
The Electro-Theremin is an electronic musical instrument developed by trombonist Paul Tanner and amateur inventor Bob Whitsell in the late 1950s to produce a sound to mimic that of the theremin. The instrument features a tone and portamento similar to that of the theremin, but with a different control mechanism. It consisted of a sine wave generator with a knob that controlled the pitch, placed inside a wooden box. The pitch knob was attached to a slider on the outside of the box with some string. The player would move the slider, thus turning the knob to the desired frequency, with the help of markings drawn on the box. This contrasts with the theremin, which a performer plays without touching as two antennas sense the position and movement of the performer's hands.
An electronic keyboard, portable keyboard, or digital keyboard is an electronic musical instrument based on keyboard instruments. Electronic keyboards include synthesizers, digital pianos, stage pianos, electronic organs and digital audio workstations. In technical terms, an electronic keyboard is a synthesizer with a low-wattage power amplifier and small loudspeakers.
The Trautonium is an electronic synthesizer invented in 1930 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschule's music and radio lab, the Rundfunkversuchstelle. Soon afterwards Oskar Sala joined him, continuing development until Sala's death in 2002.
An electric organ, also known as electronic organ, is an electronic keyboard instrument which was derived from the harmonium, pipe organ and theatre organ. Originally designed to imitate their sound, or orchestral sounds, it has since developed into several types of instruments:
Oskar Sala was a German composer and a pioneer of electronic music. He played an instrument called the Trautonium, an early form of electronic synthesizer.
Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.
In music, the undertone series or subharmonic series is a sequence of notes that results from inverting the intervals of the overtone series. While overtones naturally occur with the physical production of music on instruments, undertones must be produced in unusual ways. While the overtone series is based upon arithmetic multiplication of frequencies, resulting in a harmonic series, the undertone series is based on arithmetic division.
Manfred Sepse Lubowitz, known professionally as Manfred Mann, is a South African-born musician, resident in the UK since 1961. He is best known as a founding member of the bands Manfred Mann, Manfred Mann Chapter Three and Manfred Mann's Earth Band.
York Höller is a German composer and professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Köln.
A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis. These sounds may be altered by components such as filters, which cut or boost frequencies; envelopes, which control articulation, or how notes begin and end; and low-frequency oscillators, which modulate parameters such as pitch, volume, or filter characteristics affecting timbre. Synthesizers are typically played with keyboards or controlled by sequencers, software or other instruments and may be synchronized to other equipment via MIDI.
Harald Bode was a German engineer and pioneer in the development of electronic musical instruments.
The Berlin Musical Instrument Museum is located at the Kulturforum on Tiergartenstraße in Berlin, Germany. The museum holds over 3,500 musical instruments from the 16th century onward and is one of the largest and most representative musical instrument collections in Germany. Objects include a portable harpsichord once owned by Prussia's Queen Sophie Charlotte, flutes from the collection of Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica.
The Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio was a facility of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. It was the first of its kind in the world, and its history reflects the development of electronic music in the second half of the twentieth century.
Benedikt Brilmayer is a German musicologist with a focus on organology at the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum.
Friedrich Trautwein was a German engineer. Trautwein developed the Trautonium and is considered a pioneer of electronic music in Germany.
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