Even if we don’t know its name, we’ve all heard Johann Pachel­bel’s Canon in D, bet­ter known sim­ply as Pachel­bel’s Canon — and prob­a­bly more than once at a wed­ding. But though Pachel­bel com­posed the piece in the late 17th or ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry, it has­n’t enjoyed a con­sis­tent pres­ence in the world of music: the ear­li­est man­u­scripts we know date from the 19th cen­tu­ry, and its lat­est peri­od of pop­u­lar­i­ty began just over fifty years ago, with an arrange­ment and record­ing by the Jean-François Pail­lard cham­ber orches­tra.

And so, no mat­ter how many times we’ve heard Pachel­bel’s Canon, and no mat­ter how many ver­sions we’ve heard, we might well ask our­selves: have we real­ly heard Pachel­bel’s Canon? In the video above, San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music — here Kather­ine Kyme, Car­la Moore, and Cyn­thia Freivo­gel on vio­lin, Tanya Tomkins on cel­lo, Han­neke van Proos­dij on baroque organ, and David Tayler on the the­o­r­bo — per­form what many enthu­si­asts would con­sid­er a defin­i­tive Pachel­bel’s Canon. Not only do they play that ear­li­est of its known man­u­scripts, they play it using instru­ments from the time of Pachel­bel, and with the kind of play­ing tech­niques pop­u­lar back then.

“The string instru­ments are not only baroque, but they are in baroque set­up,” notes the video’s descrip­tion. “This means that the strings, fin­ger­board, bridge and oth­er parts of the vio­lin appear just as they did in Pachel­bel’s time.” The video shows that “no met­al hard­ware such as chin­rests, clamps or fine tuners are used on the vio­lins, allow­ing the vio­lins to vibrate freely.” As for the organ, it’s “made entire­ly of wood, based on Ger­man baroque instru­ments, and the pipes are voiced to pro­vide a smooth accom­pa­ni­ment to the strings, instead of a more solois­tic sound.”

Just as van Proos­di­j’s tech­nique might look slight­ly unfa­mil­iar to a mod­ern organ­ist, so might Kyme, Moore and Freivo­gel’s to a mod­ern vio­lin­ist: “All three are play­ing baroque vio­lins with baroque bows, yet each per­son has her own dis­tinct sound and bow­ing style — each bow has a dif­fer­ent shape and bal­ance.” Their play­ing dif­fers in the way, the notes add, that musi­cians’ play­ing appears to dif­fer in paint­ings from the 17th cen­tu­ry, a time when “indi­vid­u­al­i­ty of sound and tech­nique was high­ly val­ued,” and none of it was over­seen by that most 19th-cen­tu­ry of musi­cal fig­ures, the con­duc­tor. How many his­tor­i­cal­ly-aware brides and grooms — with the means, of course, to hire not­ed ear­ly-music ensem­bles — will it take to bring those val­ues back into the main­stream?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepi­ano, the Instru­ment That Most Authen­ti­cal­ly Cap­tures the Sound of His Music

How the Clavi­chord & Harp­si­chord Became the Mod­ern Piano: The Evo­lu­tion of Key­board Instru­ments, Explained

Mashup Weaves Togeth­er 57 Famous Clas­si­cal Pieces by 33 Com­posers: From Bach to Wag­n­er

Pachelbel’s Music Box Canon

Pachelbel’s Chick­en: Your Favorite Clas­si­cal Pieces Played Mas­ter­ful­ly on a Rub­ber Chick­en

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

There is a lot of cre­ative­ly revised his­to­ry in the Net­flix hit show Stranger Things, and I’m not just talk­ing about extra-dimen­sion­al mon­sters and Sovi­et sci­en­tists under shop­ping malls. There’s also the puls­ing synth score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. Deserv­ing of all its praise, the music nonethe­less gives the impres­sion that the sound of the 1980s was made by instru­ments of the 60s and 70s—analog syn­the­siz­ers like the Min­i­Moog Mod­el D and effects like the Roland Space Echo.

Such clas­sic instru­men­ta­tion does cre­ate the per­fect weird, fuzzy, wob­bly, lush accom­pa­ni­ment to the show’s com­pelling mix of sci-fi body hor­ror and cud­dly nos­tal­gia. But the 80s was the gold­en age of new sound tech­nol­o­gy, dig­i­tal, and the dawn of syn­the­siz­ers like the Yama­ha DX7, released in 1983, the year the saga of the Upside-Down begins. Along­side mas­sive­ly-pop­u­lar dig­i­tal synths like the Roland Juno-60, the DX7 defined the 80s like few oth­er elec­tron­ic instru­ments, quick­ly ris­ing “to take over the air­waves,” as the Poly­phon­ic video above explains.

Bri­an Eno, Ken­ny Log­gins, Whit­ney Hous­ton, Her­bie Han­cock, Depeche Mode, Hall & Oates, Van­ge­lis, Steve Win­wood, Phil Collins, The Cure… one could go on and on, nam­ing a major­i­ty of the artists on the charts through­out the decade. Why was the DX7 more appeal­ing than the ana­logue sounds we now asso­ciate with the height of synth qual­i­ty? Poly­phon­ic explains how the DX7 used an algo­rithm called FM (fre­quent­ly mod­u­lat­ed) syn­the­sis, which allowed for more refined con­trol and mod­u­la­tion than the sub­trac­tive syn­the­sis of ana­log synths built by Moog, ARP, Buch­la, and oth­er spe­cial­ized mak­ers in the 70s.

That meant dig­i­tal key­boards had a wider range of tim­bres and could con­vinc­ing­ly sim­u­late real instru­ments, like the marim­bas in Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F.” Dig­i­tal synths were pre­dictable, and could be pro­grammed and cus­tomized, or used for their many already excel­lent pre­sets. And just as Fal­ter­mey­er’s Bev­er­ly Hills Cop theme was inescapable in the mid-80s, so too was the sound of the DX7. It was “damned near ubiq­ui­tous,” writes Music Radar. “After years of exclu­sive­ly ana­logue synths, musi­cians embraced the DX7’s smooth, crys­talline tones and for a while the air­waves were rife with FM bells, dig­i­tal Rhodes emu­la­tions and edgy bass­es.”

Though it’s hard­ly as well known, the DX7 may be as influ­en­tial in 80s music as the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Yama­ha’s dig­i­tal synth was so pop­u­lar that it “almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly spawned the third-par­ty sound design indus­try, and forced oth­er syn­the­siz­er man­u­fac­tur­ers to take a hard look at how they were build­ing their own instru­ments.” Learn about the his­to­ry, ver­sa­til­i­ty, and cus­tomiza­tion of the DX7 from Poly­phon­ic in the video above. And stream a playlist of songs fea­tur­ing the DX7 below. While our 80s nos­tal­gia moment favors the rich­ly har­mon­ic tones of ana­log synths from ear­li­er decades, you’ll learn why the real 1980s belonged to the dig­i­tal DX7 and its many com­peti­tors and suc­ces­sors.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

The Roland TR-808, the Drum Machine That Changed Music For­ev­er, Is Back! And It’s Now Afford­able & Com­pact