What are examples of onomatopoeia in songs?

John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" (1962) opens its chorus on the figure itself: "boom boom boom boom," the word imitating the gunshot the next line promises. That is onomatopoeia (a word whose sound imitates the thing it names; a scheme of sound, not meaning), and popular music is full of it, from Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash" (1958) to Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" (2009) to Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam" (2023). The catch is that the syllables that spring to mind just as fast, doo-wop's "sha-la-la" and Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" (1993), aren't onomatopoeia at all: they imitate no sound in the world. One question separates the real examples from the filler, and it starts with what boom does that "sha-la-la" can't.

Percussive Words in Choruses and Hooks

The core pattern is a single sound-imitating word dropped into a chorus because it lands on the beat the way a drum hit does. "I got that boom boom pow" (Black Eyed Peas, "Boom Boom Pow," 2009) stacks three of them into one line: boom imitating a bass hit, pow imitating an impact. Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" (1966, written by Sonny Bono) hangs its whole chorus on bang, the sound of the shot standing in for the shot itself. Vengaboys' "Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!" (1998) strips the pattern to its skeleton: the same sound-word repeated four times on four beats, lyric and kick drum saying the same thing.

The same few words keep recurring, and the reason is physical. Boom, bang, pow, and clap are short, they open with a plosive (a hard stop consonant like b or p), and they carry one stressed syllable. A drum hit has the same acoustic shape. Put one on a downbeat and the word's own stress and the bar's stress line up, so the word gets struck twice: once by its sound, once by the rhythm section.

Song Titles That Are Themselves Onomatopoeia

Some songs promote the sound-word from lyric to identity. John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" (1962) names itself after the sound it is built on, four booms opening every chorus. "Knock on Wood" (Eddie Floyd, 1966; the Otis Redding and Carla Thomas duet followed in 1967) puts knock in the title and then has the drums answer it with an actual knock on the beat.

The pattern still produces hits. Kylie Minogue's "Padam Padam" (2023) takes its title from a coined word imitating a heartbeat: "Padam, padam, I hear it and I know." The word exists nowhere in the dictionary. Its entire job is to sound like the thing it names, which is the figure in its purest form.

Title-level placement changes what the word does. Inside a lyric, an onomatopoeic word is one effect among many. As the title, it becomes the song's name, its hook, and usually its most-repeated line all at once.

Did you know? The percussive title looks like a pop-era convention, but John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" (1962) predates disco, hip-hop, and the Vengaboys by decades. The move comes out of the blues, not out of 2000s pop.

Weather and Water Sounds Voiced in Lyrics

Not every onomatopoeic word in a song imitates percussion. Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash" (1958) opens on a coined water-word: "Splish splash, I was takin' a bath." Splish is not a dictionary word any more than padam is; Darin needed a sound one notch lighter than splash and made one.

Joni Mitchell's "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" (1975) works the other register. The title track's central image is the hiss of suburban lawn sprinklers, and hissing carries the sound in the word itself, the sustained s doing what the sprinklers do.

Nature-sourced onomatopoeia behaves differently from the percussive kind. Hiss has no plosive attack and no clean rhythmic slot, so it doesn't land on a beat. It works atmospherically instead, coloring the line rather than driving it. So water and weather words tend to show up in titles and verses, while boom and bang dominate choruses.

Comic-Style Vocalized Ad-Libs in Hip-Hop and Pop

The newest branch of the percussive pattern is the ad-lib: a sound-effect word dropped between lines rather than inside them. The clearest case is skrrt, an imitation of tires screeching, common enough in hip-hop that Kodak Black made it a title with "Skrt" (2015). The word does exactly what boom does in a chorus, it just does it from the margins, punctuating a line instead of anchoring it.

These ad-libs descend from the comic-book sound-effect tradition, the same lineage as the BAM and POW panels of superhero comics: a freestanding written sound effect, detached from any sentence, standing in for the noise of the action. A rapper voicing skrrt after a line about a car is doing with the voice what a comic letterer does with display type. It is not a separate phenomenon from the percussive-hook pattern above, just the same figure moved from the chorus to the spaces between bars.

Nonsense-Syllable Hooks: Onomatopoeia or Just Filler?

Plenty of the syllables routinely listed as onomatopoeia aren't. Doo-wop's "sh-boom" (The Chords, "Sh-Boom," 1954), the "sha-la-la" of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" (1967), and Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" (1993) all get cited as examples of the figure, and none of them qualifies. These syllables imitate no real-world sound. They are vocalese: sung syllables standing in for a lyric, chosen for how they feel in the mouth and sit on the melody, not for what they depict.

The test is one question. Does the syllable imitate an actual, nameable sound? Boom names a low impact you could point to. Hiss names a sprinkler, a snake, a leak. But "sha-la-la" imitates nothing; nothing goes sha-la-la except people singing "sha-la-la." The Crash Test Dummies hum is a hum, not an imitation of one, which is the difference between making a sound and depicting it.

There is a genuine middle case. When a repeated syllable clearly voices a specific, nameable sound, it crosses back into onomatopoeia. ABBA's "Ring Ring" (1973) repeats a syllable pair the way doo-wop does, but ring ring is the sound a telephone makes, and the song is about waiting for a call. Same surface shape as "sha-la-la," different figure underneath. Apply the test to the syllable, not to the style of song it appears in.

Instrumental Onomatopoeia: When the Guitar Does the Imitating

The figure's impulse, making the sound of a thing stand in for naming it, can run through an instrument with no word involved. The opening of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" (1984) is drums and guitar imitating a motorcycle idling and revving before the song proper starts. The Cure's "The Lovecats" (1983) scatters guitar scratches and vocal yowls that imitate the cats of the title.

One caution on terms. Strictly, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech, so it lives in words; a guitar imitating an engine is the same imitative move carried by an instrument, and "instrumental onomatopoeia" extends the label to it by analogy. The extension is standard enough to use, but if you're citing an example of the figure in the strict sense, cite a lyric. The word boom is onomatopoeia on the page with the record turned off. The "Hot for Teacher" intro only imitates anything when it's playing.

Did you know? Instrumental sound-imitation long predates the electric guitar. Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" (1900) has the strings imitate an insect's buzz through fast chromatic runs, a century before Van Halen's motorcycle.

How Songwriters Actually Use Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia clusters in choruses, hooks, and titles because those are the parts of a song built on repeating a sound for emphasis, and a word that carries its own percussion rewards repetition instead of wearing out under it. Percussive words dominate because they land on the beat the way a drum does; nature sounds color verses and titles instead; ad-libs punctuate from the margins; instruments take over when no word is needed at all.

Pattern	Example	Why it works
Percussive word in the hook	Black Eyed Peas, "Boom Boom Pow" (2009)	Short plosive syllable lands on the downbeat like a drum hit
Nature or water sound	Joni Mitchell, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" (1975)	Sustained sound colors the line atmospherically rather than rhythmically
Vocalized ad-lib	Kodak Black, "Skrt" (2015)	Freestanding sound effect punctuates the line, comic-book style
Instrumental imitation	Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher" (1984)	The instrument depicts the sound directly, no word required

The place where the figure tips into novelty is the filler confusion: reach for "sha-la-la" syllables and call the result onomatopoeia, and you've decorated the melody, not depicted a sound. When the word genuinely imitates something, the figure is structural, part of the song's rhythmic machinery rather than an ornament on it. That is why the same pattern keeps resurfacing without dating: Darin in 1958, Hooker in 1962, Sinatra in 1966, Black Eyed Peas in 2009, Minogue in 2023. The songs built on imitated sound run from blues through rock and roll, soul, disco, hip-hop, and dance pop, and the placement stays the same in all of them: short sound-words, on beats, repeated. Genres changed completely across those seventy years. The drum's job didn't, and a word that can do it keeps getting hired.