We will first talk about sound gestures and aural environment we experience in a daily life and how these have been implemented and expressed in comics as onomatopoetic words. Then, we share some games and exercises explaining how Japanese onomatopoeia is unique and fascinating. Japanese has over 1,000 onomatopoeia with syllabic and repetitive words to express behaviours, emotions and situations.
Can we do this in English?
Can we do this with sounds performed by objects. Perhaps, we can record and embed them into comics later?
Step by step, we will assemble drawings, sounds and written sounds (onomatopoeia). After the day, the artists will make an interactive webpage of our own comic strips, partially with text-based sounding words, the rest actual sounds created in the session.
Let’s make our very own comics together!
Expression through Japanese onomatopoeia
“I’m interested in the intersection between sound and text, and how this works in different languages,” explains Ryoko. “In every language there is some onomatopoeia, but Japanese has over 1,000 onomatopoeic words. Japanese onomatopoeia works differently to the form in English. In English, onomatopoeia is a word that evokes the sound of what the word is describing – such as the tick tock of a clock. In Japanese, onomatopoeia has a much wider function and impact. The sound of the vocabulary does not simply imitate sounds that the word is describing, but can capture things like emotion, feelings, movement and states of being.
“One of the best known is examples of this is ‘doki doki’. It’s the sound of a heart palpitating, and can express excitement, nervousness, fear or the feeling you might get from being with someone you are attracted to.
“Japanese onomatopoeia can express a huge range of things with great precision – such as the different ways in which people walk – whether they’re doing it energetically or in a tired, slow way. It can tell you what falling snow feels like and what kind of snowfall it is. It can tell you whether the wind and rain form a raging storm or a light shower.
This use of language is the reason that Japanese is sometimes categorised as one of the world’s most poetic languages. It gives language a very particular and expressive way of describing different states. For me, as a sound artis, this is interesting.”
New methods, new participants
Ryoko and Charlotte decided that the topic could be creatively explored through a workshop in which participants created their own comic strips. Charlotte was able to refer to her own experience in working with comic strip illustration. “There’s an abstraction and precision of emotion expressed in the words used within comic strips,” she says. “Our workshop was able to explore sound gestures and the aural environment we experience in daily life and how these have been implemented and expressed in comics as onomatopoetic words.”
Through ame CIC, they were successful in applying to the Outlands Network for funding and the workshop took place via Zoom on 28th November 2021. The workshop was free and participants joined from around the world, including Iran, California, Sri Lanka and India as well as the UK.
“The extensive promotional work and wide reach of the Outlands Network meant that a very broad range of people heard about it and took part,” says Charlotte. “To be honest, we didn’t expect to reach such a varied group, both in terms of geographical location and areas of artistic interest.”
The workshop was then split into two sessions over one day. The first session was spent learning about Japanese onomatopoeia – including the sharing of games and exercises and learning words.
In the second session participants began using the modes of expression they’d learnt in the context of creating comics.
“We assembled drawings, sounds and written sounds,” says Charlotte. “Sound for the project was recorded live during the Zoom workshop process but participants also re-recorded some sounds that they’d created on their own devices later, before forwarding to us to create a final version to exhibit as an online installation on the ame website.”
