This thread reminds me...  Waaaaayyy back in my freshman year in
college, I was in a building on campus that housed the basket ball
court and wrestling arena for the university teams downstairs; it was
known as "the snake pit"!  (At Lehigh University, in Bethlehem PA,
wrestling was/is _big_ there).

Upstairs was a large gym floor flanked by classrooms.  The upstairs
doubled as a drill floor for the ROTC detachments on campus.  What
attracted me into the building that day was the distinctive sound of
a pipe organ --  except I knew full well that there was no such animal
in that building!

I followed my ears and wound up down in the snakepit.  I _definitely_
knew there was no pipe organ hidden there!  The university was inaugur-
ating a new president that weekend, and had arranged with some company
to temporarily install an organ down in the snakepit for the investment
ceremony.

Except that up until that time ( around '64 or so) I had never heard
_any_ electronic organ that even closely approximated the timbre of
a real pipe organ; all the electronic organs of that day just didn't
sound "right".  I think that the tones generated were too pure --
too close to sine waves, and/or not enough harmonics of the right
order, etc.

So, being an engineering student, I found the tech doing the installa-
tion and started asking questions.  To shorten the story, what the
builder of this instrument had done was inject white noise into the
tone generator output!

What a difference!!  The organ didn't have tracker sounds, blower
noise, or chiff as the "pipes" sounded, but the sound of the "pipes"
was truly an extraordinary close synthesis of a real pipe organ!

Regards

Harvey Chao

 "I live with fear, death, and evil ... but sometimes I turn it off
  and use a Mac."  Author Unknown

 [ Hooray!  :-)  -- Robbie