If a Tree Falls in the Forest

There is an old Zen Koan (riddle to stimulate deep thought and reflection) that asks “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, is there a sound?”. I would like to take a crack at answering this question in a bit of a techy and engineering-nerdy way.
There is an action, tree falling, and a perception, a sound or in other words, an event and the sensing of the event. The tree falling stirs the surrounding air creating waves. We humans have a number of sensors, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch that detect activities in our surroundings and the tree falling would to various degrees stimulate all of these. The waves in the air would be sensed by our ears as sound, the moving air would be felt by our skin, our eyes could see rustling of leaves and the moving air could even bring with it smells and tastes.
Sound is a result of a number of processes. The external creation of the waves in the environment, the physiology of the ear responds to these waves with an internal vibration and the psychology of the brain that takes the internal vibrations and registers them as a sensation it has come to understand as sound. Without some sensor to feel the vibrations caused by the falling tree and a processor interpreting this sensation as a “sound” there would only by a stirring of air created by a falling tree. So my answer to the riddle is no, there is no sound. I would like to further propose that without someone in or near the forest there is no forest and no tree and only a lot of empty space with tiny portion of if filled with bundles of energy swirling around.
In Buddhism there is a notion of emptiness and as I think back to my high school physics class I recall a picture of an atom superimposed on the Empire State Building to demonstrate the idea that the greatest part of an atom is empty space. The nucleus, if my memory serves me, was the size of a basketball and the electrons the size of marbles. Though I am not current with today’s physics, I believe the subatomic particles are also accepted as being mostly empty space and some theories speculate that there is no mass even in these and only energy. So, at some level one can think of our total surroundings as being nothing but empty space with tiny bits of energy swirling around. What make the forest and the tree is the net effect of our sensors and the wiring of our brain that somehow takes the information and processes it creating the world as we know it.
The interesting question to ponder however, is how did we come to have these specific sensors and the connections in the brain to be in a forest and hear a tree falling?