Behind The New Acapella App Craze

Your Pitch Perfect dreams are about to be one step closer to reality: The “Acapella” app, launched six weeks ago, lets you record yourself singing, sync it with other tracks, and create a video collage of all the parts. That means that you and your friends can reenact the entirety of Pitch Perfect 2 this weekend, or that you can create a whole a cappella group by YOURSELF (no arguing with angsty band mates!). The app has quickly risen in popularity among young social media users, so much so that the app’s parent company, Mixcord, announced yesterday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding.

The app works by having you take multiple videos and then layer them together. The sound comes together to form harmonies (well, depending on how, er, harmonious your voice is), and the videos get put together in a patchwork of squares and rectangles. According to BuzzFeed, Mixcord came up with the idea for Acapella after seeing how people used another of the company’s apps, PicPlayPost. PicPlayPost allowed Instagram users to create collages of their photos (which Instagram does now, too), as well as videos. Users began using PicPlayPost to record a cappella music, leading Mixcord to develop an app especially for the purpose. Mixcord co-founder Daniel Vinh told BuzzFeed News, “We’re a very data-driven company. We don’t make apps just for the sake of making them.”

Acapella performances are showing up all over Twitter and Instagram, and the app has proven to be surprisingly versatile. Some are using it to post kickass a cappella skills (and some fun visual compositions):

But others are getting a bit more creative with Acapella’s capabilities, like this genius, who used the app to reenact a pivotal scene in Titanic — soundtrack and all:

This Acapella user created a moving tribute to Adele:

And, in this video, we finally witness the tragic demise of Destiny's Child: