Hi Davy. I was searching for an amazing animation clip from years ago, describing a series of brightly coloured cornets (?) or xylophones with sound accompaniments. I thought the name polyphone might be relevant and so I discovered your interesting site.
Interesting not just because of its content but because I too had a fascination with organ sounds and synthesisers. After building various sound generators, I too concluded that organ sounds were too complex for this approach. Eventually, while at uni I built a machine which stored sound samples as well as allowing the use of a keyboard as a sequencer. The entire machine had only 4 KB of ram and a simple processor running machine code.
Not particularly exciting until I explain that this was in 1978!
Sadly in those days IT was such an exciting subject that my plans to work in the music and audio industry gave way to other more mainstream technologies, although I have remained a geek over the years and even built a couple of electric guitars!
I thought I'd share this story with you as it's a bit like your own and also I thought you might like to communicate with an old greybeard like me!
How is polyphone doing? I see your copyright message is out of date and I hope that's not a bad sign! Either way it might be interesting to communicate
Best wishes
Jerry