This does not take care of all sounds that do not have a discrete source.  What is a more serious problem for the new conception is how to translate from the old conception words which name sounds separated from their events, like the word "echo".  In the old conception, it is simple to just say you hear the echo, but since an echo is itself a sound, it cannot be the object of hearing in the new conception.  One possible way out is to say that when you hear an echo, the object of hearing is the event which produced the echo.  The analogue in vision might be something like seeing a face through a distorting lens which distorts and multiplies the seen object.  In the case of vision, we still say we see the face, so it may seem natural in the case of an echo to say that what we hear is whoever is yelling into the canyon.  There are several problems with this though.  For one, when you look at someone through a distorting lens, there is some distortion but you still see their actions immediately when they occur.  In the case of an echo, it is conceivable that you could be asleep, and be woken by the first reverberation.  If you were asleep at the moment the event actually occurred, it would be awkward to say that you heard someone yelling into the canyon.  The other possibility is to say that the event you hear is the vibration of the canyon's rocks, but this has several problems in itself.  For example, if the rocks of the canyon began to spontaneously vibrate in a way that sounded like the echo of a human voice, you would have to say that that's not an unusual event at all, since you heard the same event just yesterday a second after someone yelled into the canyon.  The only possible way to deal with the case of an echo in the new conception is to eliminate the word from out vocabulary, and adopt the former solution in which what we really hear is the original event which caused the echo.  An echo, by this solution, would be an illusion of an event produced by the unusual circumstance of occurring in a canyon.  The reason something would sound so different in a canyon would not be because it really is different, but because something is obscuring and distorting the way we perceive it, similarly to how things look different under a black light even though their colors do not actually change.
Under the new conception, the properties of events that we hear would be the properties of the associated object's vibration.  When we hear a higher pitch noise, the property of the event we hear would be that it is vibrating at a higher frequency.  When we hear a louder noise, the property of the event would be that it is vibrating with more energy.  We would not be able to hear distance with certainty.  This is another problem with the new conception - what we call the volume of a sound, the new conception would consider to be a function of both the energy of the vibrations in the object as well as the distance of the object from us.  This is unusual, but is not devastating to the new conception, because there exists a parallel in the world of vision in the case of "red shift".  When an object in space is moving rapidly away from us, the wavelength of the light it emits grows longer - the color shifts towards the red.  Because of this, the color of an object in space is a function of both the color of light it emits, and the speed at which it is moving away from us.  It is like if someone was tossing coins out of his car window at an even rate while driving.  If you measure the distance between each coin, and have no other information, you cannot pinpoint exactly how fast he was going because you don't know how frequently he was tossing coins out.  Although the new conception of hearing does have this parallel in vision, it is a slight disadvantage because while the phenomena of red shift is something only physicists have to deal with and talk about, whether an event is near or far is something that everyone encounters in daily life.  
