Dawn Upshaw is an American soprano. She is the recipient of several Grammy Awards and has released a number of Edison Award-winning discs; she performs both opera and art song, and her repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
The Persuasions were an American a cappella group that began singing together in Brooklyn, New York in the mid-1960s.
The MSU Accafellas are a Tenor-Bass, collegiate a cappella group from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Founded in 1996, the group typically has between eight and eleven singers. The Accafellas have released 8 albums to date. Their arrangement of Jason Mraz's You and I Both appeared on the Best of College A Capella (BOCA) compilation in 2006. In 2010, The Accafellas performed their arrangements of Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn and Would You Go With Me in Nashville, Tennessee before the CMA Music Festival with Josh Turner.
Jerome Eugene Lawson was an American singer, producer, musical arranger and performer, best known as the original lead singer of the Persuasions.
The Princeton Footnotes are a low-voice a cappella group from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The Footnotes are a student-run, semi-professional performance group that generally consists of ten to twenty members. The Footnotes hold auditions for first-years and sophomores twice during the school year. They are a part of Princeton University's "Acaprez" a cappella organization, which includes the Nassoons, Tigertones, Katzenjammers, Roaring Twenty, Tigerlilies, Tigressions, and Wildcats.
The SoCal VoCals are the first of nine a cappella groups from the University of Southern California. Founded in 1996, the group's signature achievement is being the only a cappella group to win five titles in ICCA, which it accomplished in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2018. In 2020, The A Cappella Archive ranked The SoCal VoCals at #1 out of all ICCA-competing groups.
The Sing-Off was an American television singing competition featuring a cappella groups. It debuted on NBC on December 14, 2009, and was produced by Sony Pictures Television and Outlaw Productions, with Mark Burnett's One Three Media being added for the fourth season. A fifth season aired as a holiday special in December 2014.
Barry Strauss Carl is an American voice-over actor and musician best known as the bass of the a cappella vocal band Rockapella while the group was house band on the PBS children's geography game show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?. He was a member of Rockapella from 1988 until he left the group in 2002. Carl is known for his signature deep voice, which he used during his years with the band to create an almost instrumental sounding bass.
The second season of The Sing-Off began on December 6, 2010. The number of a cappella groups was increased from eight to ten, with all acts coming from the United States. Nick Lachey remained as host and the three judges, Ben Folds, Shawn Stockman and Nicole Scherzinger, also returned. Deke Sharon returned as music director and vocal producer. The music staff included Ed Boyer, Ben Bram, and Bill Hare. The program was broadcast for five nights in December with the finale on December 20. The season premiere averaged 8.5 million viewers. On the finale, the group Committed became the second champion of the show, beating Street Corner Symphony, The Backbeats and Jerry Lawson & Talk of the Town.
Committed is an a cappella group of six male vocalists from Huntsville, Alabama, all students at Oakwood University, a historically black Seventh-day Adventist school in Huntsville. The group—Therry Thomas, Dennis Baptiste, Tommy Gervais, Geston Pierre, Robert Pressley and Maurice Staple—began singing together in 2003, inspired by another a cappella group that originated at Oakwood, Take 6.
BYU Noteworthy is a nine-member, female Brigham Young University (BYU) a cappella group, based in Provo, Utah, United States. They won 1st place at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA) in 2007 and appeared on the first season of NBC's a cappella competition reality show The Sing-Off in 2009. Esther Yoder formed the group in 2003, aided by members of BYU's Vocal Point. Noteworthy began operating under the direction of the Performing Arts Management (PAM) at BYU in 2014. One of their most popular music videos is a cover of Amazing Grace, which won the Contemporary A Cappella Society (CARA) award for Best Religious Video and has garnered millions of views on YouTube since its release. Noteworthy has released six albums since its formation in 2003. In 2018, Noteworthy performed "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" for a Mormon Message for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Peter James Hollens is an American singer-songwriter, producer and entrepreneur. He has been involved with a cappella music since 1999 when he and Leo da Silva founded the University of Oregon's a cappella group, On The Rocks, known as the first official collegiate a cappella group in Oregon. He regularly releases new music videos to his YouTube channel. With over 5 million followers and over 3 million subscribers, his content has received over a billion total views since 2011.
Pentatonix is an American a cappella group from Arlington, Texas, consisting of vocalists Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kirstin Maldonado, Matt Sallee, and Kevin Olusola. Characterized by their pop-style arrangements with vocal harmonies, basslines, riffing, percussion, and beatboxing, they produce cover versions of modern pop works or Christmas songs, sometimes in the form of medleys, along with original material. Pentatonix was formed in 2011 and subsequently won the third season of NBC's The Sing-Off, receiving $200,000 and a recording contract with Sony Music. When Sony's Epic Records dropped the group after The Sing-Off, the group formed its YouTube channel, distributing its music through Madison Gate Records, a label owned by Sony Pictures. Their YouTube channel currently has 20 million subscribers and more than 6 billion views. The group's video tribute to Daft Punk has over 365 million views as of December 29, 2022.
The Exchange is an a cappella band from the United States founded in 2012 by Rochester, NY native Aaron Sperber. The group consists of Aaron Sperber, Alfredo Austin, Christopher Diaz, Jamal Moore, and Richard Steighner. The band was a finalist on Season 5 of NBC's musical reality television show "The Sing-Off" and also performed as the Backstreet Boys' opening act during the 2014 “In a World Like This” European tour.
Kevin Oluwole Olusola, also known as K.O., is an American singer-songwriter, beatboxer, and cellist. Olusola is best known as the beatboxer of the a cappella group Pentatonix. After the group won NBC's The Sing-Off in 2011, they released eleven albums, which have sold over 2 million records, and have amassed more than two billion views on their YouTube channel.
Avriel Benjamin Kaplan is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for his basso profondo range and for his tenure as the vocal bass of the a cappella group Pentatonix from 2011 to 2017. As a part of the group, he released five studio albums, won three Grammy Awards, and sold over six million albums.
Home Free is an American country a cappella group of five vocalists: Austin Brown, Rob Lundquist, Adam Rupp, Tim Foust, and Adam Chance. Starting as a show group, they toured with approximately 200 shows a year across the United States. The group won the fourth season of The Sing-Off on NBC in 2013. They sang an arrangement of Hunter Hayes' "I Want Crazy" as their final competitive song, earning the group $100,000 and a recording contract with Sony.
The Princeton Katzenjammers are the oldest co-educational collegiate a cappella group in the Ivy League. The group consists of fourteen to eighteen Princeton University students and holds auditions at the beginning of each semester. Its repertoire includes a wide variety of musical styles, with an emphasis on jazz, pop, and classical.
Bill Hare is an American Grammy Award-winning audio engineer known for pioneering contemporary recording techniques in a cappella. He was the first to record voices individually, and the first to mic singers exactly as one would mic instruments. Over the course of his career, Hare has become well known for his outsize role in shaping the sound of recorded a cappella. Industry observers have called him the "patriarch" and "the Dr. Dre" of a cappella recording. Deke Sharon, founder and longtime president of the Contemporary A Cappella Society, wrote of Hare's influence in 2018: "The sound of contemporary recorded a cappella owes more to his technique, style, and pioneering than any other person."
Voctave is an 11-member a cappella group based in Central Florida, United States. The group consists of several performers from the Voices of Liberty a cappella group at the American Adventure pavilion at the Epcot theme park at the Walt Disney World resort. The group often performs intricate arrangements of music from Broadway, Disney, jazz standards, and Christmas music. Among the unique characteristics which set the group apart from other a cappella groups is an extremely wide vocal range of 5 full octaves.
