Tarja Soile Susanna Turunen Cabuli (born August 17, 1977) is a Finnish singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...

 and composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

. She is a full lyric soprano

Lyric soprano

A lyric soprano is a type of operatic soprano that has a warm quality with a bright, full timbre which can be heard over an orchestra. The lyric soprano voice generally has a higher tessitura than a soubrette and usually plays ingenues and other sympathetic characters in opera. Lyric sopranos have...

 and has a vocal range

Vocal range

Vocal range is the measure of the breadth of pitches that a human voice can phonate. Although the study of vocal range has little practical application in terms of speech, it is a topic of study within linguistics, phonetics, and speech and language pathology, particularly in relation to the study...

 of three octaves.

Turunen studied singing at Sibelius Academy

Sibelius Academy

The Sibelius Academy is a university-level music school which operates in Helsinki and Kuopio, Finland. It also has an adult education centre in Järvenpää and a training centre in Seinäjoki. The Academy is the only music university in Finland. It is among the biggest European music universities...

 and Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe

Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe's University of Music is a college of music in Karlsruhe, Germany.-Studies:The Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe offers tuition in voice, orchestral instruments, piano, composition and music journalism. The academic degrees go from Bachelors to Artists Diplomas.- External links:*...

. She is well known as a professional classical lied

Lied

is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...

 singer but best known as the former lead vocalist of the Finnish symphonic metal

Symphonic metal

Symphonic metal is a term used to describe heavy metal music that has symphonic elements; that is, elements that are either borrowed from classical music or, as with progressive rock music, create a style reminiscent of it, e.g...

 band Nightwish

Nightwish

Nightwish is a Finnish symphonic metal band from Kitee, Finland. Formed in 1996 by songwriter and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, and former vocalist Tarja Turunen, Nightwish's current line-up has five members, although Tarja has been replaced by Anette Olzon and the...

, which she founded with Tuomas Holopainen

Tuomas Holopainen

Tuomas Lauri Johannes Holopainen is a Finnish composer known best for symphonic metal music. He has also studied jazz and classical styles, but prefers to be influenced by harmonic film music....

 and Erno Vuorinen in 1996. Their combination of hard and fast guitar riffs with Turunen's classical lead vocals quickly achieved critical and commercial popularity.