“Is sound a secondary object?” is an ongoing project investigating the relationship between sound and image.

In The Aesthetics of Music, Roger Scruton claims that sounds are "secondary objects," that is, objects in their own right, with their own unique properties, independent of the material stuff that causes them.¹ But even if this is so, does this imply that we experience sounds as independent of their material causes? Synthetically produced electronic sounds that have no clear perceptible provenance would seem to provide the strongest examples of cases where we experience sound without an associated physical object. But even here, we often make sense of these electronic sounds in terms of the physical stuff in the world that we are already familiar with. These short clips pair electronic sounds with moving images, exploring instances in which synthesized sounds connect with the physical world and instances in which they pull away.