Sound Beat takes a daily trip through the history of recorded sound using rare recordings from the Belfer Audio Archive at Syracuse University.  Each episode focuses on one particular recording, and provides its historic back story.  From popular and classical music to distinctly American musical forms like jazz, bebop, country, and bluegrass, the program features old favorites, rare gems, and some rarely heard surprises.  Sound Beat episodes also feature speeches and spoken word recordings from some of the great thinkers and luminaries of the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries -- people like Thomas Edison, George Bernard  Shaw, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Roosevelt.