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Sound Beat
Weeknights at 9:58pm

Got 90 seconds?

Then you've got time for a trip through the history of recorded sound!  Sound Beat is a daily, 90 second show highlighting  the holdings of the Belfer Audio Archive.  The Belfer is part of the Syracuse University Library, and with over half a million recordings, is one of the largest sound archives in the United States. Each SB episode focuses on one particular recording from the Archive, and provides a back story detailing its place in recording history.

For more information, visit the Sound Beat website.

What kinds of recordings? Popular and classical music performances, film scores those from distinctly American musical forms like jazz, bebop, country, and bluegrass. Old favorites, rare gems, and some we guarantee you've never heard before -  from Cab Calloway to the castrated stars of Italian opera, you'll hear it all on the Sound Beat!

And it's not just music. Sound Beat episodes also feature speeches and spoken word performances from some of the great thinkers, political figures and luminaries from the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries. People like Thomas Edison, George Bernard  Shaw, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Roosevelt.

  • The Carter Family’s rendition of "Honey in the Rock", a Coral Record from 1949.
  • Nighttime is often the right time for thoughtful reflection..especially when one is on guard duty in the Army.
  • One of the most distinctive signature sounds in all of recorded music.
  • A buddy song from two of the best buds in the biz.
  • You're listening to Pearl Bailey from 1946 and you're on the Sound Beat. Pearl made her Broadway debut that year, performing "It's a Woman's Prerogative" in St. Louis Woman. Though audiences weren't enamored of the play, her performance marked the beginning of a decades-long love affair between Bailey and the American public. That "special time together" included a Tony award for Hello, Dolly! and later pop-culture staples like "The Love Boat", "The Muppet Show" and "Hollywood Squares". Ol' softy President Richard M. Nixon made it all official in 1970 proclaiming Bailey "Ambassador of Love". The position was rumored to pay 80,000 hugs annually with a guaranteed pension of half that amount. Nixon even accompanied Bailey on the piano. Turns out he was an amateur composer. Click here for video of Nixon's Concerto No. 1...and some Truman jokes thrown in for good measure.
  • Billie Holiday was known to record with ease, often needing only one take for her best studio recordings. This tune, however, was a whole different story.
  • What happens when the high-gloss worlds of archived sound and auto insurance collide? Hope you’ve got a policy for excitement.
  • Alan Freed may have been the first to attribute "Rock and Roll" to a musical form, but he wasn't the first to use the words together.
  • Censorship has been a big issue in the U.S. since, well, before there was a U.S.
  • You’re listening to Bransby Williams with Charles Dickens’ redeemed cheapskate.