“Sound” is vibrations in the air hits your eardrum and your brain converts to an experience of “hearing” something. Ultrasonic audio is just vibrations outside the range of conscious human hearing. Animals can hear these frequencies and respond to them. We just never evolved to “hear” those frequencies, but the brain can still process them.
That’s the theory. We don’t quite know how ultrasonic works, just that it does. We have an actual brainwave scanner and we’ve tested it multiple times – when you listen to an ultrasonic, your brainwaves patterns change and match what we’ve seen with subliminal use.