Those 100 people did interpret the tree falling, though.

Better might be: if a tree falls in the forest and only a protein was present (yes, a protein), did it make a sound? No — because sound doesn’t exist. Air ripples propagate and are interpreted as sound by ears, and there were no ears present to do the interpretation.

Similar if there was a human present. Did the tree make a sound? No — because the didn’t do anything different based on whether the human was present or not. The tree didn’t all of a sudden make anything. New information was interpreted, dare I say even curated, by the interpretation itself.