The term “onomatopoeia” in the title of this project in French is “onomatopée,” in Japanese “オノマトペ,” and in Ancient Greek “ὀνοματοποιία.” The diction of onomatopoeia in a broader sense means echoisms and ideophones, which have been extensively used from the ancient days to nowadays to describe diverse sounds and states of objects in one’s daily life or surroundings during adventures, from the ”λίγξε” (the twang sounds of bows) in Iliad and the “σίζω” (the hiss sounds of eyes when they’re pierced by fervid wooden stakes) in Odyssey, to poundings of hammers beating against walls when neighbors carry out house renovations, clickety-clacks of keyboard typing, cracks on phone screens, and rust on outer racks of air conditioners in the modern world. Thousands of sounds and object states occupy people’s perceptions and memories in different proportions. Once focusing on the compositions and proportions of the sounds and states, we can get the picture of specific dwellings, involving their appearances and tendencies. Likewise, supposing we meticulously survey and research into echoisms and ideophones in the stories of oral literature handed down from the old days, features of their "Diégèse" as well as the lifestyles and cultural histories of the stories’ origin places will also be revealed.

The conduction of the project The House of Onomatopoeia partly lies on the curiosity of the researcher/creator about Gérard GENETTE’s so-called “opaqueness” of onomatopoeias that illustrates the unseparated intertwining relationship of a language user’s awareness of words’ sounds and meanings, and partly on the experiences of several years from workshops and educational occasions where the researcher perceives people’s passion for creating and writing onomatopoeias, hence the series of writing experiments. In addition, through the research results on comparative narrative studies in the past years, the researcher realizes that the broad utilization of onomatopoeias enables the general public to take a deep dive into characteristics of objects and transform their concrete or abstract experiences into oral expressions with easily-manipulated and conveniently-practiced sounds. The residency in C-LAB will be the departing point for the series of The House of Onomatopoeia in hopes that more participants can enjoy and familiarize themselves with the echoisms and ideophones invented by themselves and others. It will cover the fields of folklore, literature, comparative narrative studies, linguistics, and environmental acoustics while connecting with the studies of synesthesia in the realm of neuroscience.