Project One.
I was really interested in the Hammond tonewheel mechanism (same basic idea as the Teleharmonium we saw pictures of in class) used in many of their organs, and also the synthesis abilities of the SuperCollider program. The Hammond organ is a great instrument to try and replicate, as it is basically an electromechanical additive synthesizer (as opposed to an analog or digital additive synthesizer). The reason for this is because the tones created by the tonewheels are about as close to sine waves as one can get by electromechanical means.
The original Hammond organs had 96 tonewheels, with each key playing 9 tonewheels, and nine drawbars (with each one's values ranging from 0 to 8) that controlled the volume of the different tonewheels. The frequency of each of the wheels controlled by the drawbars is a whole number harmonic of the key's assigned frequency (ranging from 1 octave below the note to 3 octaves above).
SuperCollider is a programming language and the name for the software that translates programs and commands written in the language into OSC commands, and sends those commands from the client side to a server (which can be on the same computer or across the world, so long as the two are connected). I've provided the rich text file with the commands I wrote in my attempt to make a synthesized Hammond organ. It can be opened and run from inside the program right after downloading without any real fuss. I tried to provide comments that were as complete as possible, but feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions (though if you're expecting any level of expertise, you're probably going to be disappointed).
If you don't feel like waiting and downloading SuperCollider, or you don't own a Mac (there are versions of SuperCollider for Linux and Windows, though they're not as complete), here's what it sounds like when run in the program (recorded straight from the program with no compression or editing, so there's some silence at the beginning and it starts out pretty quiet):
If, for some reason, you'd like to save it to your hard drive, here are an mp3 and an ogg vorbis file. You might have also noticed from the text or the recording that there's a kind of Leslie effect going on, which I did try as part of an attempt to make the droning sine waves sound a little bit more like a real Hammond organ (just a little panning and tremolo, no attempt to recreate the Doppler effect or tonewheel leaking). I also recreated a bass and snare drum sound (which I think both sounded better than my organ attempt) to make it a little more interesting, which wasn't entirely inappropriate as many of these machines had simple analog rhythm machines built in. If you'd like more information, check out the Project One section on my links page.