Haha. This is awesome. I wonder what the final output would be. A full song?
This works beautifully in the composition first paradigm of lisps/clojure. The APIs are a bit hard to wrap your head around if you intend to use Overtone for the entire production process but I've had lots of fun with using it as the mother of all synthesis engine
This is the exact same sort of sound you'd get if you picked up any DAW or hardware studio and tried to recreate the song in a few moments.
It's almost certainly possible to create something true to the original, but there's no way it would be suitable for a "recipe" for showing people how Overtone/SuperCollider works.
Commercial studios have racks full of boxes that start from $2000 each that fatten up and sweeten the sound, and a commercial track will patch every element through multiple boxes during mixing. The mixing desk itself will add its own sound.
Most of the boxes have analog circuitry inside them. Modelling it is not easy, and good models can use so many cycles it's no longer possible to listen to their output in real time (at least, not without using external hardware acceleration).
None of the mainstream music code environments - Overtone, SuperCollider, Csound, Max/MSP and so on - pay much attention to this. They mostly come with trivially simple DSP models which don't sound all that great.
Surprisingly, they also make it hard to use more complicated models even if you know what you're doing. Mostly you can't just add the model in user land - you have to add it as an external, and rebuild.
Commercial software from Korg, Yamaha, NI, UA, Access, and most pro and semi-pro VST makers puts more effort into sounding good, but the high quality models are somewhat proprietary and the code isn't often open sourced - although sometimes the models appear in papers from (e.g.) the ICMC.
Da Funk's lead can be reasonably approximated with cheaply available modeling software, or moderately priced analog synths. Here's someone getting decently close with Massive, which is around 200 dollars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB1_JxbT_1s
The article's sound is just still too simple. I've not used Octave, but I'm sure that with some work, it could achieve quite a bit more.
Also, just comparing them by ear. Over each note, the copy builds up and then builds down in volume in a <> shape. The original has a sharper attack and then fades gradually, which looks more like a > shape.
I think the copy also has an unnecessary reverb effect, but I'm not sure.
This is all malleable of course. None of this is the fault of the software. It's just a difficulty inherent to reverse engineering.