FROM NOISE TO MUSIC: A plethora of sound in a soundless picturebook

By Vitor Faustino Dos Santos

Do you know that we can hear the sound of the Big Bang on the webpage of a renowned physicist? Or that the status of the loudest animal is contested by a giant whale and a tiny shrimp? Do you have any idea that people have created a house that sounds like a musical instrument? Have you ever considered that everyday objects like a saw or even vegetables could be used as musical instruments? Believe it or not, there is a whole orchestra built around that premise: the musicians make soup out of the vegetables and serve it to the audience at the end of the performance! This information and many other exciting curiosities about the phenomenon of sound can be found in the spectacular picturebook Sound (Shhh… Bang… POP… BOOM!).  

Written by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, this award-winning nonfiction picturebook takes its readers on a fantastic journey through the history of sound. Although it is unusual to think about the history of sound in chronological order, the clever infographics and images in this picturebook do a great job of establishing the linearity of the existence of sound in our universe and the relationship it has with all living and nonliving things in our perceptible cosmos. 

            Colourfully illustrated, this picturebook explores the visual power that images have to evoke different senses. The choice of vibrant colours to represent sounds is strongly linked to the fact that sound itself is the vibration of particles in space. Therefore, vibrant colours represent vibrant particles.

The relationship between the verbal and visual text is masterfully organised to reinforce the same message. For example, as soon as we open the book, we can see an illustration on the end page showing a graphic representation of sound, where a flat line means silence. This graphic shows silence in the verso and noise on the recto and foreshadows the phrase in the first opening of the book: “In the beginning it may have been quiet. But then it became loud. The universe filled with sounds”.

            The illustrations aim to represent not only the visual “shape” of sounds but also how they manifest in existence. The images kinesthetically create forms for sounds in such a powerful way that it seems like the book’s creators could actually see what the shape of a sound is. If the reader lingers on each opening, it is not long before they can produce mental sounds by simply looking at the pictures.

The authors have also thought carefully about how to tell this non-fictional story in a logical order. First, the book shows how the human body perceives sounds, detailing our external and internal auditory systems. This is followed by an explanation about how, by finding patterns between sounds and arranging them in order and harmony, we humans have created the art of music. It then highlights that, by organising our own unique sound—the voice—, we have discovered the art of singing. However, the book also draws attention to our involuntary internal sounds and how loud the human body can be, even when excluding our vocal cords. Our stomachs rumble loudly if we are hungry, our bones make cracking noises when we move, and our skin wheezes if we rub ourselves. We produce sounds whether we want them or not; we just need to pay attention to them, and this book suggests you do it.

            The reader then learns how noises keep accumulating and expanding if we slowly zoom out of ourselves and observe the noises that bodies produce in a house and the noise that several bodies and homes can make in a city. The book cleverly moves from the sounds produced by urban human society to the ones of nature, mentioning sounds that do not exist anymore to raise awareness of how humans have affected the natural environment around us.

            The book then tells us about the measures we have created to understand and classify the audible part of the universe, using decibels to describe how loud a sound is and hertz to measure the frequency of sound waves. Yellow semi-circles designate the areas with more and less compressed air in some of the pages, representing more accurately how sound waves behave in space.

            This is followed by the invention of different objects that can capture a sound which keeps getting refined to provide more pleasant experiences with sound. These experiences are shaped in our society by what the authors call ‘people of sound’: musicologists, musicians, acousticians, singers, conductors, DJs, sound technicians, composers, radio show hosts and so on.

            One of the most powerful things about this book is that, while exposing our relationship with sound, the authors also highlight the role of the absence of sound in our lives. They draw attention to non-vocal communication such as sign language and fingerspelling. Moreover, the authors note the importance of silence for people who can hear. The images in the final spreads of the picturebook beautifully represent how silence makes us connect with what is important within and outside of ourselves. On one page, the figure of a person holding their umbrella in the centre of the verso contrasts the white space created by the protection of the umbrella with the “rain” of coloured onomatopoeia that ‘falls’ from the top of the page to the sides of the human figure. This image helps the reader associate the white space with silence. This idea is reinforced by the following spreads, where both verso and recto show an abundance of “silence”, represented by all the white space surrounding the central images. By building our understanding of white as silence and bright colours as noise, we are struck by the power of the image representing an origami bird in the centre of a white page, flapping its wings and producing visual sound with the vibrant yellow that outlines the picture.

The authors manage to take their readers on a kinesthetic journey about sound through verbal and visual texts that are masterfully intertwined to reinforce and represent each other’s messages. By using simple verbal language and rich, colourful images, this picturebook explores the concept and complexities of sound in an exceptional and creative way.

Book Details

Sound: Shhh . . . Bang . . . POP . . . BOOM!

Romana Romanyshyn, Andriy Lesiv

San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020

First published: 21 March 2023

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