In part 1 you need the sound turned on to solve the puzzle. I don't think I could have ever gotten farther than that on my own. Even at home I keep the sound turned off on my computer unless there is something I specifically want to listen to.
If you look at the network requests when the page loads you can see a good hint that something is going on, 'dialuptone.mp3' is requested from the server (and there are DOM <audio> nodes to play it). I guess if they had wanted to be sneaky they would have generated the sound with the Web Audio API [1], but I'm not sure what browser support is like for that yet.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] thread[1] http://webaudio.github.io/web-audio-api/