HOWARD PINES

 

 

Howard Pines

Wednesday, January 22, 7:30 p.m.

The Whale Song Translation


Author and speech scientist, Howard Steven Pines, has taken language research to a whole new realm with his debut science fiction novel, The Whale Song Translation. In the spirit of Carl Sagan’s Contact and Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this fast-paced thriller is about sound—the sounds of language, sounds of songs, and the sounds that kill.

When the Navy’s sonar experiments begin killing humpback whales in the Auau Channel near Maui, acoustics professor David Dmitri’s scientific expedition to decode the language of whale songs goes into high gear. His race to detect intelligence in the sounds of the big-brained beings becomes dangerous when others threaten to stop him—whatever the cost. In pursuit of a breakthrough in interspecies communication, Dmitri makes an astonishing discovery.

Howard Steven Pines has spent 25 years as a Silicon Valley software engineer and has 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. The realization that human speech evolved into a process of shape-writing and shape-matching was the inspiration for the interspecies communication experiments featured in this first book of a fictional trilogy-in-progress, The Torch of Prometheus.

Event date: 
Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - 7:30pm
Event address: 
1010 El Camino Real
94025-4349 Menlo Park
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