Genre of song where instruments are replaced by vocals

Question

I wanted to ask you what genre this song is: Bring the noise - Prossimamente su Italia 1

I am not talking about the original, I am talking about this remix where instruments are substituted by vocals, like Pentatonix does.

Answer 1

This is a capella music (often rendered in recent times as acapella). The original phrase is an Italian music term meaning "in the style of the chapel," but the English meaning is "music without instruments," meaning voices only, sometimes with the addition of body percussion.

Acapella is perhaps literally the oldest form of music, but there have been many different versions of it over the years, from the monastic hymns referred by the original Italian phrase to the American barbershop quartets of the late 1800's and early 1900's. There is a particularly strong acapella tradition in the black American community, starting with the field hollers and spirituals of the slavery years, up through the aforementioned barbershop quartets, the doo-wop of the 1950's, and the acapella R&B hits of the early 90's.

A newer style of acapella focused around covers and adaptions of current pop music has been popular on college campuses for many years. It reached a new level of mainstream appreciation with the introduction of the televised American acapella game-show style competition "The Sing Off," and the subsequent popularity of the show's most famous winners, Pentatonix. This is the style most people mean currently when they use the term "acapella."