If I remember right, it wasn’t sonic, but a psychic blast. The scream was just the usual “a telepath hits breaking point and explodes while screaming” Due to his biochemical links to the dilithium, it acted as an amplifier, and was momentarily rendered inert, which is extremely bad news when you have a bunch of stuff on the verge of constantly exploding, relying on a specific property of dilithium.

For us, it’d be like Q briefly snapping away the neutron absorption features of nuclear moderator rods. Things would go south extremely quickly, especially if no-one was expecting anything like that to happen.