A multibarreled glass-coated tungsten microelectrode suitable for single-unit recording and iontophoresis in chronically behaving animals is described. The microelectrode was stiff enough to pass through the dura matter of behaving monkeys, and can be applied as a microiontophoretic electrode. The electrode is easy to build and usable in stabilized conditions after repeated penetrations.

This paper deals with the problem of checking the consistency of the speech corpus during recording in terms of the level of speech power of individual recordings. The question was whether or not setting of the limits of RMS value is useful for checking the volume consistency of recordings destinated for unit selection speech synthesis.

Recent studies using modern functional imaging methods have provided insights into the brain areas involved in combining information across the senses, and the manner in which sensory signals are integrated within them. These findings are remarkably consistent with the results from single-unit recording in animals.

The paper gives a brief summarisation of preparation and recording of a phonetically and prosodically rich speech corpus for Czech unit selection text-to-speech synthesis. Special attention is paid to the process of two-phase orthographic annotations of recorded sentences with regard to their coherence.

Current unit selection speech synthesis voices cannot produce emphasis or interrogative contours because of a lack of the necessary prosodic variation in the recorded speech database. A method of recording script design is proposed which addresses this shortcoming. Appropriate components were added to the target cost function of the Festival Multisyn engine, and a perceptual evaluation showed a...