And now interplanetary percussive maintenance is a thing too.

I was just about to say that

I worked on something that literally said "to test this thing, hit it here with a screwdriver" because it was known to be a point where a soldered joint would fail

I used to bash the shit out of some stuff with a hammer to prove my diagnoses. It wasn't working anyway, so I couldn't break it more, and I was usually proved correct when I was able to replicate the failure

U gotta account for the different air density and effects on sound due to that

I am sorry but this is a ridiculous consipiracy theory, I have never met a single engineer in my life who wouldn't be laughing maniacally (all fear irradiated in a recursive, exhaustive employment of their analytical mind to a hypothesis, plan and then blueprints) as they stumbled out of their cubicle hole they had imprisoned themselves in for the last 8 hours to their coworkers respectful, knowing but still mildly concerned distant acknowledgement brandishing an attitude and persona that looks to the untrained eye COMPLETELY like somebody impersonating Charlie from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but the room of fellow scientists and engineers know the engineer has either truthfully reached a point where their idea is shit and they have lost their sanity and ability to state why or they have just pulled the funniest joke on everybody else they ever will in their entire career in the process of saving the day. Somehow, if you could freeze time and ask everybody in that room to bet which eventuality will reveal itself to be true, nobody in the room would bet that the engineer had lost their sanity, no matter the crazed performance in front of their boss and basically everybody else important to their stupidly narrow niche of engineering, they trust the engineer's desire to make amazing shit happen implicitly for no more complex reason their life is if nothing else proof of that axiom being the core of their organism...... and look now.... they have the same wild look in their eye of "....ha good jok.. wait no.. that is a dumb idea but... oh I am going to be SO annoyed if this ends up actually working but ok... give me a pen and paper!!!!!!!!".

I imagine to an untrained eye this might appear quite like a complete outbreak of madness, but I don't see how it could have happened any other way.

I love that guy.

Nah. At that point it only looks stupid.

It does (ok, one catch: if there's an atmosphere), sound has physical nature. The trick is in asking whether music/art/languages exist after any sentient life is gone

It's a mars robot designed to take samples...

I’m sure the local hardware store has a shovel you can use.