I don't know how much this has to do with mechanical music, but I don't
know where else to ask.  I'm reading a splendid book: "The Perfect
Machine," by Ronald Florence.  It's a comprehensive history of the
building of the Mount Palomar telescope.  This was a _long_ project,
started in 1928.  Along the way, there were certain nationwide economic
instabilities, to wit, the Great Depression, which seriously dulled
the public's appetite for nifty new scientific and technological
innovations.  By way of illustration, the author points out that,
"The economic critic Stuart Chase told the Women's City Club of New
York that the advent of "talkies" had thrown ten thousand movie house
technicians out of work."

I understand that the people who played pianos and/or organs for the
musical accompaniment of silent movies would clearly have lost their
jobs with the introduction of sound in motion pictures, but I don't
think that musicians would have been considered "technicians" at that
time.  Would a movie theater chain have maintained a corps of piano
or organ technicians to maintain their instruments (which seems
reasonable) or am I missing some other aspect of silent movies here?

Were automatic musical instruments used to accompany silent movies?
If so, was any sort of synchronization implemented?

Mark Kinsler