Obviously, whales must have some hard wiring in their brains that does all that for them and more. They can probably process sound coming from several directions at once, for example. Throw in a little signal processing and pattern recognition, and you have something more like vision than hearing. They may even see sound in color, with color representing different frequencies of sound, and gray level representing intensity. However, the similarity with human seeing cannot be entirely accurate.
Sound waves penetrate flesh to some extent.
Moreover, some of the sound they emit can be felt with the sense of touch, as some divers have reported. Perhaps the courtship songs of whales in close proximity are really ways of feeling one another up. I stress the close proximity for sound picture communication, because it would be impossible when whales are far away from one another. The sonar spatial resolution goes down with the distance, just like objects that are far away appear smaller than objects that are nearby. If the object is far enough away it appears to be a single point.