	Under the current conception of hearing, we can speak of both events and of the sounds they produce as being the types of things that we hear.  Careful analysis of the way we speak shows that we consider the sounds themselves to be the things that are direct objects of hearing, and the events producing the sounds to be indirect objects of hearing.  Someone unfamiliar with the nature of language may suggest that we speak this way simply because that is how sounds are.  Or, alternatively, someone may say this way of speaking is wrong because that is not how sounds really are, so we should change our way of speaking to more reflect the nature of reality.  A proponent of either of these positions ends up saying things which have no meaningful content.  Roberto Casati's claim that sounds really are properties of objects, for example, is made without specifying the criteria by which something really is a type of thing, how that is different from us just considering it to be that type of thing, and how his claim falls under the former classification.  There are, however, advantages and disadvantages in certain ways of speaking about hearing.  One conception may contain an inconsistency, or may take a paragraph to say what the other can say in a sentence.  In this paper, I will be exploring an alternative conception of hearing in which events are directly heard, and discussing the consequences of such a conception.  
	It is first necessary to classify the different types of things that can make sounds according to this new conception.  One type of event that can make a sound is an event that is local to one single object.  For example, when you strike a tuning fork (with anything), the sound that you subsequently hear is local to the tuning fork, and is being made by the tuning fork.  If you did not hear the object which initially stuck the tuning fork, you will still hear the sound that the tuning fork is now making.  If the tuning fork began to spontaneously vibrate (which is extremely unlikely yet physically possible), the resulting event would be the same that would follow striking the tuning fork with an object.  Another type of event which makes a sound is that which involves two or more objects interacting.  When you clap your hands, or slam a car door, the event making the sound is the interaction between the two objects.  If the incredibly unlikely event occurred of one hand beginning to spontaneously vibrate at a frequency corresponding to the vibrations it would make if another hand were clapping against it, we would be hearing a different event then the event of two hands clapping together.  Any event involving interactions between two or more objects would fall under this category.  There would also be a third category for events which have no discrete source, such as the wind blowing.
	Under the new conception of hearing, much of our speech would be the same.  Any event about which we can currently say "I hear X", where X is a discrete and known physical event, would be said in exactly the same way as it is currently said.  The types of things that we hear that we would talk about differently would be sounds which have a source that we cannot identify, and sounds with no discrete source or a sparsely distributed source.  
