Hearing seems clearly related to time-based patterns. Sure the role of the fovea is played by your fingertips and the role of the saccade is played by the movement of your fingers over an object. Feeling an object creates a time-varying pattern. As the neocortex suggests, a common mechanism underlies vision, touch and hearing. You have to consider it together with the dominant nature of feedback.
People tend to view the brain as a sort of input-output box.
The input comes in, it gets processed, and out pops the result and you do the right thing. Well, if you look at the interconnections in the brain, there are many more fibers feeding backward than feeding forward. There's more information traveling toward the input areas than there is toward the output areas the ratio can be as high as 10 to 1. This is again something that is well known, but generally ignored because people don't know what to make of it. One of the biggest implications is that parts of the brain look like what are called autoassociative memories.