Transferring tacit knowledge : learning how to sing through YouTube

Expert-novice communication is a particularly challenging area of study where the learning process is conceived of as polarized between following instructions and gaining experience. The case of singing is especially challenging in that the visual component – key to acquiring complex motor skills – is almost completely absent. As a consequence, in order to transmit his/her expertise, the vocal coach will rely heavily on verbalisation, thus having to reformulate the expert discourse in order to make it accessible to the novice. This makes the singing jargon worthy of being looked into from a linguistic point of view, even more so in light of the paucity of studies that investigate the discourse of learning outside educational settings. The present study is intended as a linguistic comparison of different approaches to tacit knowledge transfer, its goal being a qualitative assessment of the strategies employed by three vocal coaches that have tackled the issue of high notes and shared their videos on YouTube.