The eight session singers sang through Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as a sight-reading exercise and found the music to have a natural swing.

[1] In England, Swingle assembled a group of singers with an emphasis moved from classical music to a cappella arrangements of madrigals and then on to other styles.

[6] The current group performs primarily, but not exclusively, a cappella and over the decades has explored a wide range of styles, from show tunes to rock to avant garde to world folkloric music to straight ahead jazz to classical, including the entire repertoire of the original Swingle Singers.

[15] Luciano Berio wrote his postmodern symphony Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra in 1968 with the Swingle Singers in mind (appearing on the original premiere recording with the New York Philharmonic).

The group's music has a trademark sound and is used frequently on television (The West Wing, Sex and the City, Miami Vice, Glee),[6] in movies (Bach's Fugue in G Minor (BWV 578) in Thank You for Smoking, Mozart's "Horn Concerto No.

[1] In September 2014, the French blog Dans l'ombre des studios published Swingle Singers' Pavane for a Dead Princess (Maurice Ravel), a previously unreleased 1967 recording.