Nikola Tesla was a most interesting fellow. He was certainly a genius, and invented many extremely brilliant and useful inventions. However, to be blunt, he also had some pretty wacky ideas, and many of his ideas for inventions turned out to be entirely impractical, or even wildly impractical and dangerous. (If you recall, for all that DaVinci was a genius, many of his ideas for flying machines are obviously silly and couldn't possibly work - based on modern engineering knowledge.)
However, as for Tesla.....we currently do our best to avoid unnecessary electrical noise, and excessive amounts of airborne electromagnetic radiation are generally considered something to be avoided, and even potentially dangerous. For example, exactly how dangerous it is to live directly under a high-tension power line is still disputed. Tesla's wonderful idea to "bring free power to everyone" involved broadcasting so much power into the atmosphere that you could, literally, hang a fluorescent tube on your wall and light your house.... In other words, his goal was to deliberately generate so much electrical noise, and transmit it through every square inch of the atmosphere, that it could light a bulb, or power an electric airplane. By today's standards, this would have exceeded "safe allowable limits" by a factor of at least tens of thousands of times. However, when Tesla came up with the idea, having massive amounts of high-frequency energy beamed through your body simply wasn't understood to be dangerous. In other words, by today's occupational safety limits, he wouldn't have been allowed to even turn on his prototype with a human anywhere near it. I used to live on Long Island, where his original facility was built, and there were stories about how, when he fired up his "small prototype", it scared horses pulling carriages because it caused lightning bolts to jump from telegraph poles to the ground five MILES away - which many people considered to be "annoying and dangerous". (I just wanted to point out that not ALL of what Tesla came up with was genius, or even useful, or safe. However, your basic assertion, which was that many of his inventions failed to get backing, or were even opposed, purely for financial reasons, was entirely true.)
As for "our understanding of how we perceive music and sound", I think I might choose a different analogy that the shape of the Earth. When I went to school we learned that all matter was made up of subatomic particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. These were basically little hard bits of "stuff", indivisible into smaller pieces, which made up all matter. Note that this model of how things worked was actually pretty good - it explained most things to do with physics and chemistry - and even how atomic bombs worked. However, nowadays, we all know that it was also vastly oversimplified.... since, contrary to what we thought, those "tiny indivisible particles" are made up of smaller particles after all, and none of them are actually particles anyway, but merely little bundles of energy of a special sort. In short, the story has gotten much more complicated as we've learned more of the details.
I suggest that much the same is true for our understanding of how we perceive sounds and music. Most of the original research of things like "thresholds of perception" was based on the assumption that, since all sound waves are made up of some combination of sine waves, we can understand how it all works by experimenting with pure steady state sine waves. And it was widely accepted that our ears worked strictly like a mechanical spectrum analyzer, with each little hair cell responding to a specific frequency, and simply signalling whether that frequency was present or not. Now we know that, for example, our brains can respond in very complex and interesting ways when multiple signals are present at the same time, or when they are received in a certain sequential order. We can even hear or not hear one sound altogether - depending on whether our brain has been "primed" by some previous event.... which needn't even be a sound. (In fact, since our brains process many things in parallel, and often at different rates, we can even be influenced to hear or not hear a sound by something that occurs after it.)
Therefore, while I DO believe it's fair to say that little or no proof exists that we are influenced by ultrasonic sounds we don't "consciously hear", I think it's also fair to say that no proof exists that we are NOT influenced by them either. Since it has always been assumed that they are irrelevant - little research has been done either way. Likewise, little research has been done to determine the exact effects of small time-dependent effects like ringing on what we hear. (As someone pointed out in a slightly different context... It serves the existing commercial interests better to have certain people assume that they
may be audible, and for it to remain a matter of debate, than it does to spend a lot of money doing the detailed tests necessary to prove the point one way or the other. Everyone is happy to continuing assuming what they believe is true; and nobody is motivated to spend the amount of money necessary to actually find out.)
Just to put the claims I'm making on a specific technical basis... I assert that...
I will provide you with a 3D representation of a human brain and a recording of a section of a music file. If we play that file, for a live human subject, hooked up to a real fMRI, and you can predict in advance the exact level of stimulation each portion of their brain will show at every moment during playback, and how they will describe what they perceive, then I will accept a claim that "you fully understand the phenomenon". However, if you cannot do so, then I expect you to concede that "you do not actually understand every detail of what's going on".
Note that, when it comes to the shape of the Earth, any good quality GPS system can provide PRECISELY that level of proof that "it really does know the real correct shape of the Earth".
The final proof of any scientific theory or model is the ability to predict future events. (And any failure to predict any event with perfect accuracy indicates a flaw or gap in the model or theory.)
Well, just look what has been done to Tesla ; the moment he wanted to give electricity to the people - FOR FREE - all the plugs have been pulled away from his projects. His lab burned to the ground.
Because it interfered with bu$$ine$$ a$ u$ual . Which has as a prime goal PROFIT - & some more of it.
Not because it was not doable. Or true. Or right thing to do. And the same people ( or their offsprings ) are still trying to keep everything he did under the wraps - with self-appointed right to use Deadly Force against anyone thinking otherwise.
If you utter as much as an "a" in response to the above, you'll only show whose pockets you're in.
