Though the first cinema films had no sound track, the early picture palaces were not silent. To blot out noise from the projector and the audience and also to create atmosphere, a piano, organ or band, sometimes with many instrumentalists, nearly always provided music. The music was often extemporized or adapted from a stock repertory, but was sometimes composed specially for the film. Increasingly ingenious attempts to replace live players by mechanically reproduced sound led in 1928 to the first talkies. Their sound track carried not only speech but also the film’s musical backing, though the orchestration had at first to make allowances for distortions inherent in early sound systems. By the mid-1980s, film music was developing as an essential part of cinematic art, not just in musicals and other films that more or less naturally called for music but also in productions of every sort from light comedy by way of the Westerns to heavy drama.