sound effects

Pertaining either to an alteration of the typical soundscape of your context to make it sound like something it's not, or a noise emitted from the mouth (or some other part of the body or, I guess, with the assistance of an appropriate tool) to approximate the noise made by something else.

A game on Whose Line is it Anyway?. One contestant must act out an everyday activity suggested by the audience while another contestant provides all of the sound effects.

Written sound effects are familiar from Batman tv-series and of course super hero cartoons. If they are in language you're not that familiar with they may sound really funny or disturbing depending on your state of mind.

For example, I found shooting sound effects in the books by Frank Miller very confusing. My ear says that no automatic gun says: "Brekkk!"
Just to give you some Finnish example, we may write "nar nar" for creaking sound.

Bam!
Pow!
Whammo!

Sound effects in comic books are written translations of major sounds within a particular scene. These sound effect words are usually onomatopoetic in nature as they are not real words but expressions of the sounds. Comic artists and writers use the sound effect words to help flesh out the scene for the reader, often times emphasizing volume by how large the words are written.

Comic book sound effects really came to the attention of mainstream culture during the 1960s with the television series Batman. The series used large cut scenes of sound effect words during the character battles to give the show a campy comic book feel.

Today, the sound effects that are used by particular characters to denote certain actions are well-known by comics fans. The sound of Wolverine's adamantium claws extending will forever be associated with the sound effect snikt and Spider-Man's webshooters are often given the sound thwip. Some sound effect words are so well-known that they have been changed into verbs to describe the action, as in the case of Nightcrawler's ability to teleport being called bamfing after the word used to describe the sound of imploding air that accompanies his teleporting.