rm "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as these films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era, which exis

ted from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a pianist, theater organist—or even, in larger cities, an orchestra—would play music to accompany the films. Pia

nists and organists would play either from sheet music, or improvisation. Sometimes a person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Th

ough at the time the technology to synchronize sound with the film did not exist, music was seen as an essential part of the viewing experience. "Silent film" is typically used as a historical term to describe an era of cinema prior to the invention of synchronized sound, but it also applies to such sound-era films as City Lights, Modern Times and Silent Movie which are accompanied by a music-only soundtrack in place of dialogue. The term silent film is a retronym—a term created to retroactively distinguish something from later developments. Early sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927, were variously referred to as the "talkies", "sound films", or "talking pictures". The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is older than film (it was suggested almost immediately after Edison introduced the phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had the projectionist manually adjusting the frame rate to fit the sound, but because of the technical challenges involved, the introduction of synchronized dialogue became practical only in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the adve