Book Launch: The Whale Song Translation by Howard Pines

When the Navy’s controversial sonar experiments begin to destroy Maui’s whales, an unlikely hero emerges. Inspired by his mentor’s paradigm-busting challenge to open a communications channel with other big-brained species, acoustics professor David Dmitri begins analyzing the songs of humpback whales. The quest to decode their mysterious language leads him to an astonishing revelation. With more proof, Dmitri realizes he could rally public opinion and stanch the bloodshed. But as his team prepares to launch a voyage of discovery in the Straits of Lahaina, others are determined to stop him—whatever the consequences.

Come for drinks and snacks and a celebration of sound and story.

Born in Los Angeles and a lifelong Californian, Howard Pines has a love affair with the Pacific Ocean that is steeped in childhood summers playing in the waves and entranced by Northern California’s coastline, beaches, and migrating whales. His writing is informed by a twenty-five-year Silicon Valley software engineering career that led to five patents in wireless voice technology. In the adaptation of voice and modem algorithms for communication devices, he became fascinated by the theoretical and physical foundations of speech. He was amazed to recognize the connection between the natural process that created spoken language and the design of cell phone technology—they had both found the solution predicted by a fundamental law of communications. The realization of this convergence is the inspiration for his fictional trilogy-in-progress, The Torch of Prometheus. The Whale Song Translation is the first installment of the trilogy.

The idea for the book’s “Speakeasy” speech-therapy system is based on a speech-modulated, shape-writing prototype Howard developed and demonstrated at the Fremont campus of the California School for the Deaf in 1985. His understanding that human speech evolved into a process of shape-writing and shape-matching generated the inter-species communication experiment at the core of the novel. To learn more about the underlying principles common to speech, language, and whale songs visit www.HowardStevenPines.com.