1.   Held against his heart, feeling the steady beat beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes and let it wash over her in soothing waves.

2.   He uses a steady percussive beat to mark a fatalistic current, and his expectation-thwarting melody lines have a ruminative, listless, even joyless quality.

3.   His fellow Sons of Thunder circled around him, adding shouts and ad libs, and the drummers pounded a steady back beat.

4.   In a lot of Vivaldi, players can keep time according to a steady beat mutually felt.

5.   Inside the apartment, the resentful, alcoholic mother sways to the steady beat of the clinking ice cubes in her tumbler of scotch.

6.   Technology executives have pounded a steady beat of dour prognostication in recent weeks.

7.   The crowd roared its approval throughout, ululating and toyi-toying to music that included the steady beat of African drums.

8.   The sun sets here to the sounds of wild parrots and gulls, and the steady soft beat of the surf against the shore.

9.   Whether the steady beat of executions will cause disquiet for Bush on the campaign trail is far from certain.

10.   Yet the echoes are an eternal vamp of simple chords oodling away over a steady beat.