During the portion without audible dialogue, speaking parts are presented as intertitles—printed text briefly filling the screen—and the soundtrack is used only to supply musical accompaniment and sound effects.
However, box office receipts showed that, for the general public, sound versions were by and large preferred over silent films.
Seemingly overnight, the top selling records, sheet music, and piano rolls all became songs that were associated with sound films.
They argued that these additions caused previously sympathetic audiences to abruptly lower their opinions of the characters' personalities and level of intelligence.
The first film version of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, also released in 1929, had a few minutes of sound tacked onto what was basically a silent picture.
The highest quality known reel of The Phantom of the Opera is a copy of the International Sound Version which was made for foreign markets.
The only voices heard in the film are those of the factory foreman, of a salesman making his pitch by means of a phonograph record, and of Chaplin when he sings a gibberish song in a nightclub scene.
The film The Artist (2011), winner of the 2012 Academy Award for Best Picture, was promoted as a silent film and the first of its kind to win a major Oscar award since the 1920s, but it was really a part-talkie due to the use of on-screen dialog at the end, audible female laughter in a dream sequence, and the appearance of a song with sung lyrics on the soundtrack.