there are vibrations we experience that are not acoustic but which suggest sound
Any vibrating materials, a flute, an iron sphere with a hole or without a hole, a piece of shungite or of quartz, a fruit which is ripe or not ripe, a human speaking voice; anything as a sound potential vibrating source OWN his vibratory imprint and transmit it trough a medium as air when put in vibratory modes ...
The air is only the medium for the waves transmitting these imprint information coming from the vibrating sound sources "qualities" and recognized and/or decoded by the ears/brain ...
We dont know HOW exactly the ears/brain recognize "immediately" or at his high speed time ratio beating the Fourier uncertainty between frequency and time for example more than ten times and interpreted this information ABOUT the qualitative signature and nature of the sound vibrating sources...
Read what said Magnasco an acoustician :
«"In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted)»
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html
To all this for sure we can add vibrations or pattern in vibrations resulting from non acoustic influences, which may be other non audible vibrations or supra sensible information ...
Any minerals own his own "signatures"; even water can memorize any minerals signature ( Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier) ...i will stop here for this matter...😊