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> What mechanism do plants have to "hear" sounds?

Mechanoreceptors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanoreceptors_(in_plants)

The examples there are for direct contact - feeling not hearing.

What do you think hearing is? It _is_ direct contact. Sound is pressure waves directly contacting you and it is why there is no sound in a vacuum. Ear drums are tuned to a particular frequency range. But you can feel a deep bass in your chest, and that is why deaf people often enjoy deep bass music.

Sound waves in air are generally very weak and couple poorly to solids due to impedance mismatch. That's why ears have ear drums and other clever mechanisms to detect them.

Plants don't have ear drums and you can't feel a an insect buzz in your chest.

of course I can feel an insect buzz in my chest. Cicadas are amazing in full bloom. I don't find it unpalatable that plant mechanoreceptors could pick up sounds that I cannot.

You don't need an ear drum to hear, your hearing comes from tiny hairs connected to mechanoreceptors.

Guess what we've found in plants? Tiny hairs (trichomes) connected to mechanoreceptors.

So plants have the nearly the same physical structures that animals use for hearing, but not only that, they also have similar mechanosensitive ion channels too.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5685652/

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