Would film soundtracks be much different if we'd gone straight to talkies with no silent films?

Films have always had music I think - in silent films there would have been someone playing in the theatre itself with music to fit the mood of the film. This provided a soundtrack to the audience and also helped to make it clear what was happening, where speech couldn't be used (obviously there were some text boards appearing too).

Other than that I don't think there's been much of a precedent to soundtrack things since real life lacks that (obviously!). There's an episode of Family Guy in which Peter Griffin has the opportunity to ask a genie for a wish and he asks to have his own soundtrack though which is quite fun.



There are musical interludes in plays (and I suppose there always have been, although I don't know if Shakespeare annotated his plays for dramatic violins for example!) and opera is music-based storytelling so the emphasis is less on music as an accent because it's central to the piece.

But I've been wondering how music might have been used in films if there hadn't been the history of using it, during the silent era, as an accent to what was going on on-screen...

Probably unanswerable :)