Fact File: Music in Early Silent Films

The original function of music in silent film was to drown out the noise of the projector as well as talkative audiences.
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Music for silent films was usually played live in the cinema, but the musical contact varied from country to country and culture to culture.
In early periods of silent film, continuous musical accompaniment was not the normal practice; it was often intermittent and sometimes non-existent.
Initially silent film accompanists were left to their own devices and often just improvised to what they saw on screen, therefore the quality of music accompaniment varied widely.
Popular music of the day also featured in silent film accompaniment, so it is not surprising that popular music and songs often crossed over into film accompaniment.
Musical ‘encyclopaedias’ started appearing containing vast inventories of music, largely classics of the nineteenth-century western European, supplemented by some original compositions for inspiration.
As films developed and the genre moved into theatres and bigger spaces, audiences came to expect continuous musical accompaniment when watching films. From here onwards, music became a much more integral part of the film experience and has remained that way.
The US film industry began to standardize musical accompaniment around between 1908 and 1912.
The single most important device in the standardization of film music was the cue sheet, a list of musical selections that fitted to an individual film.

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The more sophisticated queue sheets contained actual excerpts of music timed to fit each scene and cued to screen action to keep the accompanist on track.
As early as 1909, Edison Studios circulated cue sheets for their films.