One - Dreaming of the Gift of Sound and Vision
As far back as the 1890s Thomas Edison dreamed that technology could enable sound and vision to complement each other. In 1894 Edison Laboratories first experimented with synchronized sound, producing a short film of two Edison employees dancing to a violin rendition of 'The Cabin Boy' from Robert Planquette's light opera 'The Chimes of Normandy'.

Two - A Berlin Circus
In November 1895 pioneering German film maker and inventor of the bioscope, Max Skladanowski, engaged a full orchestra to play marches, polkas, waltzes, and gallops for a public showing in Berlin of his film featuring trained animal acts, boxers, dancers, and acrobats.

Three - A Royal Performance
When the Lumiere Brothers crossed the Channel from France later in 1895 to bring their cinematographe system to London they engaged a full theatrical orchestra for Queen Victoria's Command performance, rather than the piano and harmonium used at other public performances.

Four - Put another Nickel in the Nickelodeon
At the start of the 20th Century many urban store fronts in America were converted to accommodate Nickelodeons showing programmes of moving pictures. These would be accompanied by music played on phonograms with enlarged trumpet speakers. Early film companies provided lists of suitable phonogram music to accompany their films. Shopkeepers often put the phonograms outside on the sidewalk to attract customers to Nickelodeon screenings.

Five - Encyclopaedic
Cue sheets were lists of suggested suitable musical accompaniments to silent films. Gaumont began issuing its 'Guide Musical' in 1907, while Edison launched his 'Incidental Music for Edison Pictures' in 1909. Out of these developed huge tomes known as musical encyclopaedias, which contained lists of categories for cinematic fight scenes, battles, wedding, villains, heroes and heroines, and lists of suggested appropriate musical accompaniments. 

Six - Lost Scores
The vast majority of the original scores composed as accompaniments for early films were never written down or recorded and so became lost in the mists of time, only hinted at on surviving cue sheets and musical encyclopaedias. However around one hundred scores used by the Kalim Company for their films were eventually rediscovered by American music academic, Martin Marks.

Seven - The Mighty Wurlitzer
The Mighty Wurlitzer was an organ developed and designed by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company and launched in 1910, as a single player instrument which could emulate an entire orchestra. As movie theatres developed The Mighty Wurlitzer became increasingly popular as the instrument of choice for musical accompaniment. Its main rival, the Morton Pipe Organ, had keys that could replicate ringing telephones, door knocks, and steam boat whistles.

Eight - It Wasn't Al
Al Jolson's 1927 film 'The Jazz Singer' is often quoted as being the first film to use synchronized sound for its score. While Jolson can rightly claim to be the first person to utter dialogue in a movie the first film to utilise the technology which allowed a synchronized score came a year earlier with Warner Brother's cinematic interpretation of Byron's epic poem Don Juan. Starring John Barrymore in the title role the film featured a score played by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded on the pioneering Vitaphone cinematic sound system.

Nine - The Eighteen Year Wait
Charlie Chaplin, the most globally successful film star of the silent era, was famously resistant to utilising sound for his movies. He felt that if his Little Tramp character began to be heard talking in English, he would alienate large swathes of his non-English speaking audience across the world. However, by the mid-1930s he relented, allowing snatches of dialogue and a score composed by himself to be used in his highly acclaimed Modern Times. Eighteen years later American songwriters, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, adapted the score and added lyrics based on Chaplin's optimistic dialogue to create the classic 'Smile', a huge hit for Nat King Cole in 1954, and covered by countless artists since.

Ten - An Avalanche of Musicals
Once the floodgates had opened for sound synchronization musicals took off in a big way. In the two-year period between The Jazz Singer in 1927 and Words and Music in 1929 Hollywood produced no less than seventy musicals, including MGM's The Broadway Melody, the first sound picture to win an Oscar for best picture. In the 1940s the musical Singin' in the Rain based its entire premise on the transition from 'silent to 'talkies'.

Eleven - Bollywood Begins
The first Indian 'talkie' was a musical. 1931's Alum Alar boasted seven songs. One of them 'De De Khuda Ke Naam Per' became a national sensation. Directed by Ardishir Irina the film was advertised as - all talking, all singing, all dancing. Sadly, no copies of the film survived, and it is now considered a lost classic.

Twelve - Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out
After the advent of sound musicals became extremely popular in the Stalinist Soviet Union. While emulating some of the Hollywood styles of the likes of Busby Berkley these musicals also utilised traditional Russian folk music and featured stoic working class protagonists. One of the most popular directors of Stalin era musicals was Grigori Alexandrov, whose films Jolly Fellows (1934) and Volga, Volga were amongst Uncle Joe's favourites.

Thirteen - Disney and the Dissidents
In the late 1930s three classical composers who were Russian dissidents visited the Walt Disney Studios in California. The works of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov provided inspiration for the score to Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia, while Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, composed in 1936, became another Disney classic in 1946. Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in the 40s and became one of the country's most popular composers. His death on the 5th on March 1953 was barely noticed, however, as Joseph Stalin himself died on the same day. 

Fourteen - The Giant Gorilla and the Leitmotif
Leitmotif was a term coined by operatic composer Richard Wagner. It's an approach whereby specific instruments or themes are assigned to key events or characters. It has become a common technique applied to many films. Peter and the Wolf uses leitmotif with different instruments representing Peter, the wolf, and other animals. One of the first composers to use leitmotif in an original film score was Max Steiner, considered by many to be the father of film music. In King Kong (1933) he used different styles of classically inspired music to accompany the ocean scenes as the ship approaches the mysterious Skull Island, more modern styles for the New York scenes, and loud Wagnerian orchestration to accompany scenes featuring King Kong.  

Fifteen - The Concerto Affair
One of the most emotive and effective uses of classical music in a film score came in David Lean's 1945 romantic drama Brief Encounter. Written by Noel Coward and starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the star-crossed lovers, the film uses Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2, played by the National Symphony Orchestra, to great effect as a reoccurring romantic theme. Concerto Number 2 has subsequently been voted as the UK's favourite piece of classical music by the listeners of Classic FM in several of its polls over the past few years.

Sixteen - Classics in Space
Stanley Kubrick's took classical music into outer space in the score of his 1968 interpretation of Arthur C Clark's 2001 - A Space Odyssey. The use of Johann Strauss's Blue Danube for the docking sequence with the orbital space station became a cinematic classic in its own right. After seeing the film Elvis Presley adopted Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra as the opening sequence for his live Las Vegas Shows.

Seventeen - You're Fired
When director Peter Hyams was given the task of directing the 1984 follow up, 2010 - Odyssey 2 (The Year We Make Contact), he deliberately avoided using classical music for fear of being compared to Kubrick. Instead, he contacted Tony Banks, keyboard player with rock band Genesis, whose theme for the movie Shout had impressed him. He was less impressed with the score Banks came up with for 2010 and promptly sacked him. Fortunately, director Roger Christian took a different view, utilising another arrangement of the rejected score for his film Starship, also known as Lorca and the Outlaws. 

Eighteen - The Horror
Horror films have produced some truly iconic scores that are etched into the public consciousness. Think Bernard Hermann's stabbing strings from the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, or the ominous tuba featured in John William's sequence accompanying the impending attacks by the white shark in Spielberg's Jaws. One of the most effective horror scores was the utilisation of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for the 1973 shocker The Exorcist, a style subsequently emulated in John Carpenter's score for Halloween (1978). And who can forget the terrifying choral based score which accompanied The Omen (1976)?

Nineteen - A Bowl of Spaghetti
Over the years theme songs and songs featured in Hollywood Westerns have become big hits in the eras in which they were released. Yellow Rose of Texas, Distant Drums, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Raindrops are Falling on My Head, are some examples. But the greatest Western scores came via Italy and the highly successful collaboration between director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone in the so-called Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 70s. Morricone was a prolific composer with 400 film and television scores and over 100 standalone classical works to his name. But he is best remembered for his scores for films such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), considered one of the most recognisable film scores of all time, and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) which sold 10 million copies in album form.  

Twenty - Are Friends Electric?
The first films to use electronic music for their score were both released in 1956. Ikira Ifukube's score for the original Japanese Godzilla movie, and Louis and Bebe Barron's haunting accompaniment to the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. But it was Delia Derbyshire's 1963 enduring synthesizer interpretation of Ron Grainer's composition for the theme of the BBC's Doctor Who which really brought the possibilities presented by electronic music to the fore, paving the way for future exponents such as Giorgio Moroder, Midnight Express (1978) and The NeverEnding Story (1984), and Vangelis, Chariots of Fire (1981) and Bladerunner (1982).