Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the use of a word, or a wordless vocalisation, whose sound imitates or enacts the thing it names, so that the sound itself carries the meaning. It runs from the obvious imitative word to the subtler case in which a sung vocable stands in for an action the lyric has already named, the voice performing what the words describe. Distinct from assonance, which repeats a vowel sound for musical texture without imitating a referent, and from metre, which patterns stress rather than mimicking a sound. Distinct again from simile and metaphor, which compare in language rather than reproduce in sound.
Collapses the distance between sign and thing: the listener hears the meaning rather than only reading it, and the effect is immediate and bodily. When a wordless vocable takes the place of a named action, the performance enacts the lyric in real time, the singer doing the thing the line only stated, which can make a figurative image suddenly literal in the ear.
Appears in 1 song
“But I howl like a wolf at the moon”
Community listeners catch the wordless vocalisation after the bridge, the sustained ooh-ooh that closes the passage, as the howl made audible: the line says she howls like a wolf at the moon, and the voice then does it, dropping the words to leave only the cry. The figure she has just stated in simile is performed in sound, the lyric's comparison turned into the thing itself for the length of a breath. Several listeners report only hearing the wolf in the vocable after a few plays, which is offered as evidence the effect works on the ear before the mind names it.