Researcher Dan Stowell has an interesting walk through of cymbal synthesis with SuperCollider that starts with a spectrogram of a real cymbal crash and goes step by step through synthesizing something similar.
Vince Clarke is a seminal synthpop figure, from his days with Depeche Mode and Yaz (Yazoo in the U.K.) to his remixing and work with Erasure. Here is a recent Native Instruments interview with Vince, who now makes his home in Maine.