>Those tests don't account for our ability to sense the presence/absence of overtones.
Overtones are frequencies. If you filter the higher frequencies you remove the higher overtones. The only way you're going to "hear" ultrasound is if it's very loud and you hear audio-frequency distortion generated in your own ear, e.g. like when bats are squeaking nearby. But this isn't useful musically, because everybody's ears distort differently.
Ok, so despite anecdotal evidence that some individuals can distinguish better-than-CD quality audio, we're questioning the existence of convincing double-blind studies. Yet we accept the varying cutoffs for what frequencies a person can consciously detect in isolation, as proof that we are incapable of perceiving audio information above those frequencies.
Are people asserting that an ear removed from a cadaver, hooked up to the best available scientific equipment, measures as a perfect biologically derived low pass filter? Or that we even partially understand how neurons work, when there may be quantum effects to be uncovered a century from now?
Intellectual history is a graveyard of models confused with reality.
Overtones are frequencies. If you filter the higher frequencies you remove the higher overtones. The only way you're going to "hear" ultrasound is if it's very loud and you hear audio-frequency distortion generated in your own ear, e.g. like when bats are squeaking nearby. But this isn't useful musically, because everybody's ears distort differently.