Bute called her films seeing sound: Rhythm in Light, Synchromy No. 4, a run of short abstractions through the 1930s and 40s that played before features in ordinary cinemas, putting visual music in front of mass audiences.
Around 1950 she began drawing with electron beams, using an oscilloscope to generate imagery for Abstronic films, making her one of the first electronic image artists, years before video art had a name.
Her marriage of oscillographic figures and popular music anticipated the entire scope-and-signal aesthetic, the same lineage Photism’s signal scene draws on. Recognition lagged for decades; restorations and scholarship have been correcting that.