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It's amazing that they can measure the speed of sound at all given this. They must need to line up a bunch of eardrums.
They measure the speed of pressure waves that our ears/brains then convert into something we would recognise as sounds. There is no sound without that conversion on our end of the eardrum/brain combo. Just pressure waves.
I appreciate your hill. But several sources disagree with you.
Wikipedia: "In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid."
Oxford: "1. vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear."
Webster: "1.c: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing"
Cambridge: "something that you can hear or that can be heard"
These don't seem to require the ear for the vibrations to be sounds in and of themselves. Only that it would be detectable by an ear if an ear were present.
Upon what do you base your assertion that it is the hearing of the thing that is the most essential requirement? (And given the thread I think it's perfectly reasonably for the answer to be something like "because it's my hill dammit!")
A sound wave isn't sound. When a sound wave hits an eardrum and vibrates, it goes through what's called auditory transduction that converts it to a signal that we recognise as sound. Without that transduction process, you're not actually hearing anything at all. Hence, the sound as we know it, is created by the receiver, not the source.
https://www.osmosis.org/learn/Auditory_transduction_and_pathways
Think of it like a radio. A radio isn't some dude on the other end yelling into a hollow tube. Someone at one end speaks into a mic. His sound waves vibrate a membrane in a microphone that converts that to electrical impulses, which are then sent to the other end where they are picked up by a receiver, which then uses them to vibrate another membrane (your radio speaker) which then sends out a pressure wave (or sound wave if you prefer) for our ear to pick up.
Without the process of auditory transduction, it's not technically sound. It's just called a sound wave because that's what it gets converted to on the receiving end.
I will gladly die on this hill.
Obviously! Well done. Your definition is delusional and at odds with science and common language use, yet you won't back down. That takes commitment. It also has me questioning whether you believe in light outside human perception (since it's also measured as a wave). You are the embodiment of this fun thread! And I genuinely enjoy thinking about both positions.
But I think I'll stick with the Wikipedia and dictionary editors, and the likes of Britannica which states:
Theoretically no.
What is colour blindness if not one persons receptors (rods and cones) translating those waves differently than everyone else? Meaning that what light "looks like" to them is completely different.
literally everything, even matter itself, is just energy vibrating at different levels of the same scale. From sound, to light, to Gamma radiation; everything exists on the same spectrum, merely inhabiting different frequency spans. so in that respect there's an argument to be had that nothing exists until its sensed by an observer.
But that's delving into philosophy.