Movie Making: Sound on Film

well as it usually does. Yeah, often sometimes I don't have time and I just pick a quote at random, But this time that actually has to do with what we're going to talk about today. It's going back to our movie making series, which we we've kind of you know, we slacked off on for a while. But we've got a lot of topics that we cover here at tech Stuff, not just movie making. So we decided we revisit the whole movie making series and look at how they put

sound on film. Right. Yeah, before before any of this happened, if we would introduce that podcast, it would have sounded like So it's a good thing that we are recording a podcast. It's it's nice that we have a way of plate of of keeping sound in some sort of fashion where we can replay it at a later date. Actually, um, I was I was looking back in preparation for this podcast. I was looking back at one of my movie books

from one of my classes in college. Uh, that would be Understanding Movies by Lewis Giannetti, a very old version. This book has come out in many, many incarnations. Now they're in the double digits. But you know an interesting point. Movies have always had sound. It's just that they didn't always have sound on film. I mean the earliest movies were just visuals, and they would hire someone to play along with it in in the uh, in the theater, in a lot of cases, on an organ. I mean

you see that. I think back to us the Three Amigos. Actually, right, it's either an organ or it's an old clanky honky tonk piano. And uh and yeah, that's that's sort of the general image we have those early films. But some of them, like some of the really big movie houses, would have a full orchestra player and uh and and in fact, that actually played a large part in why there's sound on film, or why sound on film arrived when it did. Um. In some places, of course, they

couldn't have a full orchestra. They just didn't have the space for it, or they didn't have the people, and you might have just a single musician playing on guitar along with the film, in order to provide a soundscape that goes along with the things that the audience are seeing. Yeah, yeah, and um, you know, at the time, of course, dialogue was you'd see them mouthing words, but you wouldn't hear the actors actually speak. You, you know, see the important

stuff on cards. That the more occasionally you would have a narrator. Yeah, once in a while you would have someone who would provide narration and provide dialogue, but they'd be doing it live on stage while you're watching the film. Uh.

But yeah. Eventually, the silent films got to a point where the art of the silent film was so well developed that if you were a really good silent filmmaker, you could keep those little cards to a minimum because you were able to express everything you needed to in the scenes just through the visuals, and so you would have them pop up every now and then to provide important information, like if a character suddenly reveals a secret, well, clearly,

it's hard to reveal a secret without any dialogue and so that might be important, but for other scenes where you see two people having a loving conversation with one another or a fight, you might not have a card pop up at all, because really they just want to get across that emotion that moment. There wasn't the words were not important. And uh even apparently some of the early filmmakers who were around at the time of the transition to sound on film uh actually didn't want to

do it. They said that the idea of synchronous sound with the film would actually hamper their ability to edit the film the way they wanted it to. That it wouldn't that it might actually slow them down, or or they would be anchored to the soundtrack of the film, and they didn't want to be constrained. One one notable

was the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein. Sergeie Eisenstein said, you know, I remember watching Battleship p Tempkin in my in the aforementioned movie class, and yeah, I can't imagine actually having sound in some pieces of that because of the montages he put together. But uh, other movie makers realized that they could use the actual actors voices and you could hear uh dialogue without having to you know, do stage

whispers as you might see on you know, in a play. Uh, and you could you could add the subtleties of actual verbal lang wage And there are things that you do, those things you couldn't do with a narrator or with the Q cards. That's true. And UH. The idea of actually putting sound to film goes all the way back to the earliest days of film itself, because Edison struggled with ways of creating a sound and film device that would let you to watch moving pictures and hear prerecorded

sound at the same time. He worked on that starting in the mid eighteen eighties. Yeah, so this is nineteenth century technology. Yeah, and so by he came up with a Kineta phone. Now, the Kineta phone combined two earlier UH inventions, the Kineta scope, which if you've ever seen one of those, it's it's the circular device that has slits cut in it, and it has a series of

images on the inside. And when you spend the device and you look through the slits, you see those different images appearing before your eyes in a very a quick succession, and it provides the the illusion of animation, illusion illusion and a Kineto phone or the connect. The phone part was from the phonograph. Of course, we all probably know what a phonograph is. You know, records sound on a cylinder or a disk, and then it uses a stylist to create vibrations which are then uh turned into sound

waves through some sort of amplifier, yes, often just a horn. Well, he created the Kineta phone, which combined these two things. You had to use rubber ear tubes to listen to the sound. Yeah, you don't want to hit the Kineta phone at the end of a hard day's work because who knows who's been there before you, Yeah, just saying, And they were the picture and the sound were somewhat synchronized. They used a belt system to link the two so that as the Kineta scope turned, the phonograph as turned

as well. It wasn't perfect, obviously, It was one of those early kind of prototype sort of almost a curiosity really that presaged the whole sound on film movement. What's interesting is that we have one of these films we do. One of them exists that we can actually people can go and look at if they want to. Um. It's called the Dixon Experimental Sound Film, and it was filmed sometime around what's it about. It's about seventeen seconds long.

It's uh, it's the fellow Dixon actually um he was uh playing a violin a fiddle in front of aum recording phonograph. And there's two men, um, two of Edison's lab assistants who are dancing to the music that Dixon's playing on the fiddle. And um. What's interesting is that the film and the phonograph were separated the cylinder, So you had the film and the cylinder existing in two different places. The film was with the Library of Congress.

The cylinder was with the National Park Service because it was part of the Right Museum. So you've got and and for a long time, no one knew that these two things were actually connected, that they were a part of the same event. And then it was discovered that

that was indeed the case. And uh and so ah, a fellow by Walter Merch was given the task to resynchronize these two different medium right, and so he took the film, which was seventeen seconds long, he took the cylinder, which had a recording that was about two minutes long, and he had to find out where they seek up and so You can actually see that on YouTube now if you go to YouTube and you search for Dixon Experimental Sound Film, it's on their Grant's a guy playing

a fiddle and two other guys dancing with each other. It's but it's interesting. It's the very first uh surviving sound on film experiment that we can see. And granted, now, technically the sound is not on the film itself, right, there are two different devices that coexist. And that was kind of the case for the earliest sound on film, uh the or the earliest films that incorporate sound in the pre record sound The first the first one really was Don Juan Um or Don Juan for our friends

over in the UK. Yes, but that one is a Warner Brothers film, and it was using something called the vita phone. Yes, which remarkably enough, is not a phone packed with all the nutrients that you need for the day. I was very disappointed to learn that you can have a vitaphone and still get scurvy. Yes you can. I like that, so at any rate, Yes, that's a vitamin

C joke. YEA. The vitaphone was again, it was a phonograph system and it was hooked up to a projector with a with a Pulley system of Pulley in belt system and it would synchronize the music with with whatever was being projected on screen. Now, don Juan, this was just music. It was not dialogue. Yeah. And it was a wax record too, was it not? I believe so, yes it was. It was a wax record for the earliest one. So they really did put it down on wax, Yes they did. Yes, it's that was That's not just

a saying, um. And so sound on disc not sound on film. And the disc was a thirty three and a third RPM disc. It was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric and it actually used several discs clearly because you can't you know that the disc does not have enough space on it to record an entire film's worth of soundtrack. And I understand typically to the sound for sound on disc films was recorded after the fact. Yeah,

more than anything else. It wasn't it was SYNCD up, I guess to the to the movie as it was, So it wasn't done simultaneous right well, and in this case again it was it was a soundtrack. It was the music. It wasn't dialogue. So you could record it anytime you wanted, well, right, right, But as as the as they continued to make sound on disc because the jazz singer uh you know the year after uh Don Juan slashed you and came out. Um yes, I remember

that from my college English classes as well. Um, yeah, that it was. It was out and it had it had additional material, including sound effects and dialogue, if I'm not mistaken. There was some resistance to putting sound on film. Early. Part of it was that the silent film art had really progressed to a point where people felt comfortable with it. As you pointed out, the editing issue was there. Um, some people just thought that audiences wouldn't really care for

sound on film. There was also a real problem of how how do you create the right volume so that everyone in the theater can hear this sound because the speakers weren't great this early on. It's my opinion that they are still wrestling with how much volume is enough of a well, now, it's the other way around, right, It's it's at what point do we start dialing it back?

When audiences complained that they can no longer hear anything else once the movie's over, I'm looking at you, Michael Bay and uh the but yeah, the the earliest, the reason why Don Juan was even attempted was that you had the Warner brothers, uh see a demonstration of this system, and um, Sam Warner was totally buying into it, right.

Jack Warner was not as impressed until Jack Warner saw one film that included an orchestra playing and it played the music as well, and then he thought, this is what we should use this for, not for dial dog, but just for the music, because there are so many movie theaters out there that don't have a full orchestra, and now they can benefit from that. This is brilliant. Well, then you had the Jazz Singer come out, which was

just going to be singing right. There was not any dialogue in that except Al Jolson decided to add lib a little and they kept it in the film and it ended up being a big commercial success. So then a little bit later in you had another sound film come out, Short film, very short film, famous one cartoon. It was a certain a certain mouse made appearance in it. You know what I'm getting at, right, Steamboat Willie. Yeah, Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, and uh, the mouse sure

can drive a riverboat, pilot a riverboat. I should say it was the first film that really truly synchronized sound two images and made it part of a story. Yeah, so from there there was no turning back. Uh. But the vital phone system really limited you quite a bit. For one thing, it had two points of failure, right, because I mean if the Vito phone breaks, then suddenly you've got no sound whatsoever. Right, So how do you simplify the system so you no longer have two devices

to depend upon? M m. Let's see, you could put this sound on the film brilliant? But how do you do that? I mean because superglue? Yeah, nail that note to the film buster. Um no, Actually it was really an ingenious design. Yes, it's creating an optical uh track on the film that doesn't show up on the screen, but it allows light to pass through it, and depending on how much light passes through, that's what Jenn rates

the sound you hear. There are actually photo cells that receive light and then depending upon how much light they do or do not receive, they send electric current to another device which will create the actual sound. So in a way, you're looking at the physical you're like, you're really an optical representation of what sound is. Right, You've re recorded the sound, you print it on the film so that it only allows specific amounts of light through.

It gets matched up to the two frames of the film so that everything is synchronized because it's all in one place. You've got the images on the film and you've got the sound on the film, usually to the right of the images. So if you were looking at a strip of film, you would see the images in in the middle of it, and just on the very far right edge of the image you would see this weird line or sometimes two lines, and that was the

optical track for the soundtrack. Yes, and you use an audio pickup or an audio a reader to to see that. And uh, from from our article on on movie sound, I did read that, Uh, you the analog pickups are often blow the lens while the digital pickups are above it. Right, Yeah, because of course now we do have digital sound. In the earliest days it was all absolutely and in fact most well we'll get into this, but most most films, even the ones that have digital sounds, still have the

analog track on it. And we'll explain why when we get to that point. Yeah, there's there's usually an exciter lamp inside the the actual not that kind, but it's a lamp that provides a particularly bright and pinpointed light through the the optical tracks. So it's specific for that

within a projector. And um, yeah, it goes all the way through the pre amplifier, the pre amplifier, since the amplifier which creates you know, increases the the What Chris is looking at me and laughing, I'm just wishing I hadn't done that. Oh the yes, the excited part. Yes, that's okay. I'm sure that I'll get plenty of mail about it, don't you worry. Alright anyway, So yeah, the pre ampsence sends the signals to the amplifier, which then sends the signal to the speakers, and then you get sound.

And uh, there were some a lot of movies early on in the in the forties started using this system, not the digital as I said before, just the endim um and one in particular really went overboard. Yes, Fantasia. Once again, we go back to Disney Fantasia. If you're not familiar with Fantasia, it's a film that presents several different classical music pieces set to animation done by Disney. Uh. Some of the animation, actually, much of the animation is

completely original. It doesn't have any or it doesn't rely upon their their stock characters. There's a couple of pieces that do, depending on which version of Fantasia you see. And um, yeah, I'm Disney liked to experiment with new technologies.

He was. He was very into pushing the envelope. And uh, I mean even when they the studio released snow White, a lot of people told him it couldn't be done, that creating a creating an animated feature that long would be very difficult, it wouldn't go over well with the audience. And I think every time people told him, you know, it couldn't be done or he was crazy to try it, he I think it just pushed him more to try to develop new technologies. So Fantasia was certainly an ambitious project.

Ambitious project, I'm sure it was. Um the it it had multiple tracks of sound, so it wasn't just mono sound coming from behind the screen. That was the Other thing is that early early movies with sound, they had the speakers were actually mounted just behind the screen. That was it. And it was just blasting the sound through the screen at the audience. Fantasia was more sophist, kid. It was using a fantas sound is what they called it, and not there's no big surprise there. We mentioned that

on our Surround Sound podcast a little bit. And they used actually used four mono optical soundtracks. And the problem here with four mono optical soundtracks is that's too many to fit on the actual film of the images that you're watching on the screen. If you were to fit four optical tracks side by side, it would creep into the frame of the movie and you would see that on the right side. Would be really weird, right, Yeah, there there's a physical limitation to the amount of space

available on the celluloid. In this case, you would have to otherwise create new projectors that could handle much wider film, and that's a little expensive. Yeah, this was already a little expensive. But what they ended up doing was instead of having the optical tracks appear on the same film as the actual movie, they had two separate reels of film. Really, yes, one reel of film had the images and the other

reel of film had the optical tracks on. So you had to have two projectors to show this movie the way that Disney intended it to be screened. The second projector would just be handling the soundtrack, which is crazy to me, but each of those tracks would be sent to specific groups of speakers, and that way you could get the the sensation that you're sitting in the middle of an orchestra, right, which is really what they were

going for there. They wanted to They wanted to sort of transport you as if you were actually sitting in a symphony hall, not watching a movie screen. This was a very manual way of doing it because they would fade the sound in one speaker and turn it up in the other two produce that audio illusion of depth.

So yeah, I mean people who are using the more modern tools where you can play with different tracks and add all kinds of different tracks in their computers, and this was this is a more hands on approach, if you will. So, do you know how many of these fantas sound systems actually got sold? No, but I'll take a guess. I want to say four you are twice

as optimistic or four. Yeah. One was sold to New York's Broadway Theater and the other one to Carthe Circle theater in Los Angeles, and you bet the one in n l A. But I thought they were five thousand dollars to install this thing. That's only slightly expensive. Keeping in mind this is that's incredibly expensive, and it needed fifty four speakers in the in the audience in order

to do this properly. So yeah, it's obviously this is not the kind of sound system that's gonna work for every theater, clearly and not, and it's not necessary for most movies. So really, the fantas sound was one of those things where it really kind of showed you where movie sound could could go to, but it wasn't practical for moving forward, so most most of the film studios

stuck with the optical tracks. Um. And that was pretty much the case until sometime in the fifties when they started to experiment with a new kind of soundtrack on film, which was magnetic. Yes, now that magnetic, Uh you know, I would assume, based on on what I know of these things that uh, we're talking the same type of technology that you would see in say a floppy disk or cassette tape exactly. So uh, yeah, that that was certainly an innovation, but you know, they and it it

did have better sound quality. Yeah, supposedly the magnetic approach was superior to the optical tracks at the time, uh, in sound quality if you leged to see the movie early, because unfortunately, one of the by products was that the magnetic tape or the magnetic coding rather, would wear down over time, and of course as you showed the film,

it would wear down faster. And so if you were to catch a movie three or four days after it had started playing in a movie house, especially if it had a lot of shows during the day, the sound quality would be it would be noticeably less pristine, right, it would not be pristine compared to if you had seen it the first time. They screamed the film. So that's not the case with the optical tracks. I mean, as long as the films in good shape, the optical

tracks are just fine. And uh, there are most of the movies that were made with this magnetic or some of them anyway, were they were made with this magnetic approach, did not have the optical tracks as a failsafe. Some did because people were saying, hey, you know what if the system fails for this, do we have a backup plan? And the idea is, well, we already know how to do the optical track, let's do that too, And that ended up being the rule of thumb for most audio

systems moving forward. And even when we get into digital and all all the different ways of doing digital sound, most films still keep the optical track because if something fails, you can always go back to the analog soundtrack. It's not gonna be as good as an experience necessarily, but you'll at least have sound with your movie, right. And of course, with the the financial outlay of movie theaters, they don't want to turn people away because they can't

show the film. They pay a lot of money to be able to show these films, so they want something that they can they can continue to make money off of and try to recoup their investment. Um. So they definitely want some kind of plan as a backup. Um Yeah, and that's the thing too, met the magnetic the magnetic readers that that technology was more expensive as well. Um, So that that makes it even that much more important, or at least I would imagine it would. Yeah, that would.

I'm sure that factored into decisions as they went further down the road. So when we get to the sixties. That's when we finally get into Oh, did you have something to add before that? Oh, I just noticed in my that magnetic also did did you point out that you could have up to six tracks? No? I did not, um, so that's something else. That another advantage that magnetic cats.

So we're sort of in the more modern era of sound. Yeah, we all started getting to the point where they were starting to figure out how to matrix sound, which is pretty complicated. I don't know that we can really get into it, but it's essentially it's it's taking multiple tracks and combining them in such a way so that you can represent them as one one strip of optical track. So it's the one yes, and you you really have the left, you have a left side of right side,

and then you have the center. And the way it works is everything that's coded for the left side just plays for the left side. Everything that's coded just for the right side plays just for the right side. Everything that's coded for both plays also in the center, but at a few decibels lower than on the left and right right. That's that's the easy way of explaining it, but it gets way more complex than that. So but

in the sixties. That's when we see Dolby start to enter into the movie sound market, and they had the Dolby A type noise reduction introduced in and UH. And this was this was a pretty big development as well. It's another interesting approach. UM. They will be of course played or continues to play a really important part in in movie sound today. So but yeah, that was that was when they were hitting the scene. UM. And we started getting to the point where we're approaching, when we're

getting to digital sound. That that really starts up in the seventies UM, or at least the first attempts at it UH. And then in the eighties we actually see even more of that. Now with digital you start using pixels instead of an optical track to UH to give the signal to the photocells in order to play back. At least that's one way of doing it, UM and UH. A couple of systems didn't use the optical track as

a back backup UM, which became a problem. The one I'm thinking of specifically was the Cinema Digital Sound System CDs, which this this is all the way up into it was used with the film Dick Tracy And Yeah, one of the problems with this was that they did not use the optical track as a backup, the analog track as a backup, and so if your digital system failed,

there was no backup to go with. And actually that did happen at a couple of theaters, and that it hurt the film Dick Tracy a little bit more so than the actual content of that terrible movie. Um, I was wondering if you were going to take a shot at that. Yeah, Now, what's interesting, also interesting about the the digital pixels, the little pixels that provide the uh,

the information needed to transmit sound through film. All right, these little pixel they have to be somewhere, right Where do you store them if you've already taken up space on one side with the optical tracks. I don't know. In a box under the bed. No, that's where the ambiguity is. It's over there in a box. Uh No, the it depends on the system. But one of them.

They wouldn't put the dots in between the holes in the film, right, you know where the holes are where it would fit on the rockets, right right, Okay, so you've got those little strips of film between the holes. That's where the dots would be stored for digital sound. Yeah, and then so it's not continuous. It would be with the traditional but with the with it being digital, you didn't have it have to have it be continuous as

with the optical strip. It's kind of neat. It was the Dolby Digital track that's that's for the double digital track. That's the one that will be between the little holes and the the film, so where the sprockets would go. And you can actually see a picture of that in the movie Sound article on the Dolby Digital page. You can actually see what Jonathan's talking about there. It's a little odd to think about, though, how they could do

that and have it not be continuous. Yeah. I I assume that it's because of the digital nature of it. We're talking, you know a little. It's different than analog where you have to follow along in real time with the picture. But there's also the Sony Dynamic digital sound system s d d S. Yes, SDDS. Now, if you were looking at a piece of film, uh, the s

dds would be on the outer outer edge of that film. Yea, so on the outside of the sprockets, right on the outside of the sprockets, you would find the um, the the the little digital dots for the sdd S system, and then in between the sprockets you find the Delby digital and then you find the optical tracks. And of course with the Adobe system, which I believe uses an l e ED, the Sony system uses something else to read the sound. Are you talking about the laser. I

was trying to give you the opportunity to lasers. I was hoping that was the one. I was like, you know what, I've gotten to the point. The reason why I'm I'm hemming and hawing a little bit is because my notes crashed, so I'm going a lot from memory. But yeah, I was like, yeah, I think that is

the laser system that. Yes, the light apparently goes through UH is magnified um and passes and you know, goes through the film and it's magnified and an array of photo cells picks it up and it's able to read

it that way. So yes, it is running with a laser, which I won't try to say, like you, The cool thing about this is going back to, you know, the whole idea of combining the sound and the images into one UH format so that you you don't have to depend on multiple devices and you don't have to synchronize them.

Like if you do have two different devices, you have to worry that they both are working properly and imperfect sync with one another, or else you know, your sound is not going to match up with the the what you're seeing. A video, of course, has a totally different

set up. Video is not the same as film. Uh, And so you can find like especially if you watch streaming video online, you will occasionally see streaming video where the the sound and the video are not synchronized properly, and it it gets looks like it's a really poorly dubbed foreign film. But film does not have that issue because of course it's all there. I'm assuming that your

your projectors working properly. It's all right there together. So it's really an ingenious approach to matching that sound up with the movies. I mean, if we had not come up with that optical approach analog and digital both, uh, we would probably not have as many talkies out there, I mean, just because it'd be such a pain in the butt to have to match the sound up to

the the picture. Well, it is fascinating to think about how these things go, and I think, uh back, I think we actually are seeing a uh, sort of an analog pardon the term an analog today in the three D boom because I have the feeling based on what I've read about the jazz singer and how it it really you know, took the audiences by storm and the I think it caught the movie industry off guard a

little bit about how popular it really was. And I think three D movies are another situation like that, where they're going, Wow, people really want to do this, let's go one, so they're you know, in some cases, rushing them out the dwarf, as we mentioned on our three D Movies podcast, when they're trying to capitalize convert films that were not shot in three D to become three D right right, So it's stop doing that. So yeah, I think it's sort of a similar situation um to that.

But it's it's amazing how simple the solution was to to add that to the film, how advanced it has become in their variations on the it's pretty original. Agree, I agree it, agree entirely. So let's wrap this up one little aside. I'm gonna point out one other thing that really made movies sound possible. The boom mike. Yes,

that's true. We didn't talk about that, Yeah, because because they used to blimp for a while, right, Yeah, the earliest Yeah, the blimp was essentially a soundproofed chamber that you had to put your your camera and sound equipment and when you were filming these early early uh sound films, because the equipment made so much noise that it would

drown out the sounds you were trying to capture. Yeah, initially, in the very very early movies where they tried to do this, they the cameras were stationary anyway, and so were the mics. So it's almost like it's almost like sitting in front of a stage, Yes, exactly. You weren't gonna have a lot of you weren't gonna have any panning or or anything like that. You might have a little bit of a zoom, but Sorkin would have been so out of his element. He had no walk and talk.

Let I'll tell you that. So, so the microphones often were stationary for the early films as well, which meant that you had that even further limited the movement the actors could make, because if they moved too far away from the microphone. You couldn't hear them anymore. Yeah, I'm totally reliving Singing in the Rain in my head conversation exactly because there's there. It was satirized in Singing in

the Rain. If you watch that film, they have entire scenes where they're showing the problems that they have as they try to find places to put microphones and pick up the sound without picking up unwanted sound. And it was a problem. The boom mic was a brilliant Uh, thank you for illustrating. That's not that's not unprofessional at all.

But let you're fired of the the can't fire that's true, the I don't have that authority, the no. But the boom mic really allowed actors to move around within a scene and you just kept the microphone out of frame and it solved a lot of problems. But it took a while to come up with that solution. Really, we

don't truly know who invented it. There's some kind of guesswork about it being um there was a female director who was given that that kind of um uh, she's she's credited with creating it, But we don't truly know, so I can't really say who it was that came up with that idea, but it was a brilliant one. Good job whoever you are. Anyway, that wraps up this discussion about sound on film, and we'll probably do more

movie making technology podcast in the future. We still have to talk about special effects and digital effects and the difference between the two. Maybe we'll do an entire show about Foley because we didn't get into that either, which is another element of sound. It's creating the proper sound effects for a film when and sometimes you have to use stuff that you wouldn't you wouldn't imagine would sound like what you're actually trying to make it sound like. Again,

my mind is drawn to Ben vert Ah. There you go, yes, master sound effect technician. We are going to wrap this one up. If you guys would like to know specific information about specific topics of movie making, you can let us know on Facebook and Twitter are handle there is tech Stuff hs W. You can email us. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I what talk to you again really soon,

Jonathan Um. Actually this was just handed to me. It looks like how stuff works dot Com now has an iPhone app, Sweet and that's awesome. Yeah. Actually, um, I got to to take a look at this earlier, and guys, this is pretty cool. The iPhone app is a sort of a way to integrate all the cool stuff we do at how stuff Works dot com. So you guys may have listened to one of our podcasts and we talked about there's this great article on the site, but

you're not at your computer, so you can't really check it. Well. The iPhone app actually lets you browse articles and blog post so even lets you interact on Facebook and Twitter, and you can listen to podcasts at the same time. And it has all the house stuff Works dot com podcasts on it, not just ours, but you know good ones too, so you can listen to those and look at the articles and and go on Facebook and Twitter, and it should work perfectly with your iPhones and iPod touches. Awesome.

What's it looks like. It's now available on the iTunes store, so that's good to know. How much does it cost? It's freeze sweet Ah, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you