What is hearing?
All sounds are vibrations, but not all vibrations are sounds. The critical thing is whether the vibrations are actually heard by a listener. You're probably familiar with the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I would argue no. The falling tree certainly causes a vibration, but this isn't a sound unless someone or something hears it.
Hearing is one of the five classic senses, the others being sight, touch, smell, and taste. There are many other senses, such as balance, pain, hunger, and body position (proprioception). The list of senses can be added to or shortened, divided up, or organized in any number of ways. For example, some may consider it useful to distinguish between the external senses (the classic five) and internal senses (e.g., balance) or to group the cutaneous senses together (touch, pain, tickle, itch).
The senses are separate but not distinct: some of them interact. Interestingly, when two senses interact, one of them usually dominates. There are lots of examples of vision influencing hearing, but there are very few counterexamples of hearing influencing vision. This blog is about auditory perception, so naturally, I will mostly write about the sense of hearing, but any discussion of hearing would be incomplete if we didn't mention the other senses that interact with it.
Hearing involves detection, which means simply being aware of a sound. The minimum sound a person can detect is called their threshold. Thresholds are an important concept, especially from a clinical perspective, and I will probably write about them many times on this blog.
Hearing also involves sensation and perception. These terms refer to the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information. This is what gives speech its meaning, allows us to tell one musical instrument from another, and to tell where a sound is coming from. Sensation and perception have slightly different meanings —the former describes more elementary properties and the latter describes more complex ones — but the distinction is a bit fuzzy (and not hugely important, as explained by Goldstein and Brockmole, 2016; pp. 5–6).
According to Merriam–Webster, hear as in hearing comes from Middle English heren, from Old English hīeran, and is akin to Old High German _hōren_ to hear.
Interestingly, the uses of sensation and perception seem to have flipped from their Latin roots. Sensation comes from Medieval Latin sensatio understanding (from Latin sensus) and perception comes from Latin perceptio_Â act of perceiving. I think that _sensatio sounds like the 'higher' of the two concepts and better suited to what researchers have called perception.
Stimulus is Latin and percept is a back-formation from perception.
References
Goldstein, E. B., & Brockmole, J. R. (2016). Sensation and Perception. Cengage.
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Hear. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved May 9, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hear
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Perception. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved May 9, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perception
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Sensation. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved May 9, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sensation