HOLLYWOOD — Somewhere in the second act of more pictures than he could count, a saxophone slides in under the scene — a couple parting on a platform, the slow dissolve to a rain-slick street — and for the better part of seventy years, far more often than audiences ever knew, the man playing it was Sonny Barbieri.

Mr. Barbieri, a session saxophonist whose tenor and alto were recorded into hundreds of film and television scores, died June 9 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks. He was 92. A grandson said his health had declined after a broken hip in April.

He belonged to a class of musician the audience is not meant to notice: the studio player, called to a scoring stage by a contractor, handed a part he had never seen, and expected to play it perfectly on the second take while a composer and a room full of engineers watched the clock. He could sight-read nearly anything, transpose on the fly, and produce on request the exact shade a cue wanted — smoky, comic, mournful — without needing it explained twice. The work paid union scale by the three-hour session, left no credit with his name on it, and suited him.

“You’d hear Sonny in a movie, and you’d only know it was him because you were there the day he cut it,” said Ruben Castellano, 84, a trumpet player who worked the same stages. “Millions of people have heard him play, and not one of them could pick him out of a lineup. He used to say that was the definition of doing it right. The star gets remembered. The section gets paid and goes home.”

He was, colleagues said, congenitally reliable, the first name a contractor called when a session could not afford a mistake. That reputation kept him working through the long decline of the studio orchestra, as synthesizers and sampled instruments thinned the ranks of players a scoring session hired. He grumbled about the machines the way every session man did, then went on showing up for whatever live dates remained, well into his eighties.

Salvatore Barbieri was born in 1934 in Providence, Rhode Island, and came to Los Angeles at twenty-two with a horn and a union card transferred from back East. He married Gloria Fenn in 1959; she died in 2018. He is survived by two sons, Anthony of Pasadena and Michael of Portland, Oregon; a daughter, Denise Barbieri of Hollywood; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He made a handful of records under his own name over the years, jazz dates that sold modestly and that he spoke of with a mix of pride and mild embarrassment, as a man discussing a road not taken.

His daughter said that in his last years he watched a great many old movies, and that the pleasure of it had less to do with the plots than with the scores. Now and then his horn would surface under a scene, and he would raise a finger for quiet, listen a moment, and tell the room the name of the stage, the year, and who had been sitting beside him the afternoon he played it.