The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond

by Howard Steven Pines

  Joanna’s stinging rebuke on the night of the fair compounded his frustration. “It’s fiendish,” she had snarled. “You’ve turned your love birds into math geeks.” After she’d stalked away, Dmitri had nearly cried, feeling like a failure.

  Advised the next day of a grade of A+ and a special award for his endeavor, a perplexed Dmitri had queried his science teacher. Mr. Garcia’s reply resonated throughout Dmitri’s lifetime. “It’s the nature of the scientific method. An experiment’s success doesn’t only depend on proving its hypothesis. What’s most important is that the results should lead to an improved hypothesis. The questions you pose are just as important as the answers you seek.”

  His teacher’s advice, however, had only partially helped to disentangle his jumbled feelings about the project and Joanna’s reaction. Why was life so complicated, so unfair? In less than two years, he’d lost both his father and Joanna. The memory of his parakeets had always evoked strong emotions about life’s bewildering stew of intertwined dualities: discovery and loss, success and failure, love and hate. He’d eventually learned to minimize the confusion, to build a firewall around his feelings, by immersing himself in schoolwork, hobbies, and sports.

  With the passing years and the accumulation of more science awards, it was not surprising that, as a college freshman, Dmitri would pursue a joint engineering major in acoustics and signal processing. If he were more of a true believer than a seasoned skeptic, he would have sworn that the intersection of his world line with McPinsky’s was preordained. After enrolling in SoCalSci’s Graduate School of Engineering, his new mentor had not only rekindled his childhood fascination, he had inspired its transformation into near reverence for the mathematical and scientific foundations of speech and language.

  There was no better example of this than in Dmitri’s field of specialty, digital speech engineering. Digital signal engineers had developed mathematical formulas which, when coded into a mobile phone’s microprocessor chips, transform the speaker’s voice into a compressed string of binary digits—ones and zeros. These compression techniques enable the bandwidth-limited cell phone infrastructure to support increased levels of traffic for a fixed cost. Once this information flows through the network, the inverse set of transforms at the receiving phone reconstructs a facsimile of the speaker’s voice. The quality of the resynthesized voice, he had learned, is amazingly good enough to convince most mobile phone users of the speaker’s authenticity.

  Dmitri had been blown away by his first glimpse of the international voice coding standard, called a “speech codec,” used in the early cell phones. As thick as a small phone book, it contained pages of complicated equations, codebooks, and sophisticated detectors of periodicity and randomness, all to determine the shape of the speaker’s vocal tract, the vibrations of their vocal chords, and most importantly, to capture the essence of personality in the medium of sound.

  Nothing, he had thought, could be more compelling than to reduce the pitch and timbre of spoken words to their primitive mathematical elements as dictated by signal theory, to reconstruct them according to the same rules, and to hear the results: the immediacy and poignancy of a human voice. Thanks to his mentor’s inspiration, the realization that speech, the acoustic vessel that conveys our thoughts, emotions, and identities, could figuratively be dissected into little pieces and then reconstituted into the reanimation of the original utterance was a moment of satori.

  Dmitri had experienced this revelation first hand, many years ago, during a college summer internship. He’d been hired by a Fortune 500 cell phone manufacturer to test the voice quality of their product subject to a variety of challenging situations, such as noisy acoustic and electronic environments, networks saturated by high volumes of traffic, and even for speakers with pronounced accents. Remembering the emotional impact of hearing his father’s voice when watching old videos, he’d fed a precious family recording into a computer simulation of the company’s speech codec prototype. He wasn’t at all surprised that the program’s resynthesized version, a mathematical abstraction of his father lovingly calling out to his mother, “Sylvia, honey,” still held the power to move him to tears.

  With the passage of years, McPinsky’s challenge had set Dmitri upon a path which ultimately led to PICES, Chris Gorman, and Melanie. His life had done a full circle, and all the significant threads had comingled. His world now encompassed a convergent mix of sounds—the sounds of language, the sounds of songs, and tragically the sounds that kill. Thinking about tomorrow’s hope for a breakthrough, the familiar tingling sensation returned.

  EUREKA, EUREKA

  SoCalSci University, Los Angeles, California—two days later

  “Give it up, pal. Get some rest.” Dmitri’s voice was hoarse with fatigue, his tone apologetic. “Your face looks like a slept-in suit.”

  “Your eyes look like Bloody Mary’s.” Greg stroked his face, measuring the lengthening stubble for the twentieth time. “It’s just no use. We’ve scoured every second of the data in all three of the recordings. Just the random circular loops and that single bull’s-eye in the Maui data. There’s nothing at all in the other two recordings, just burbles and bleeps. No interesting shapes or patterns.”

  “And I was hoping for more instances of inflection points where the symbols might be likely. The humpbacks guard their secrets well.” Dmitri’s pale face wore an amused grin. “Never say die. I’ll ask Gorman for more data.”

  Greg’s lips sputtered like a motorboat. “Just label me a skeptic.”

  It was late afternoon, and Greg and Dmitri had toiled for two sixteen-hour days in SoCalSci’s Signal Processing Lab investigating the whale song data. With no breakthrough in sight, Seema and Andrew had resumed their own research projects. Dmitri had occasionally excused himself to attend office hours and meetings while Greg, who had no other commitments, spent the entire time in the lab. They’d experienced fleeting moments of inspiration, only to be disappointed as the mirage of discovery evaporated into the recesses of the LCD monitor.

  Greg counted the empty cans of Red Bull strewn across the desk. “I’m done. I need a shower and a quickie nap. Got a big date with Michelle tonight.”

  “Go for it, pal. I’m late for my 4 p.m. lecture. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Dmitri vanished through the double doors.

  * * *

  After the drive home, Greg entered his sparsely furnished bachelor flat. He checked his voicemail, changed out of his jeans, and slipped into his favorite garment—a silk, “thousand cranes” motif, jujitsu kimono he’d acquired on a recent trip to a Japanese university. He completed his daily regimen of yoga exercises and then sought relief in the shower. As he lathered up, he tried to shift his attention to the pleasant prospect of his date. Yet he couldn’t shed the suspicion he had glimpsed a fatigue-masked clue lurking somewhere in the song data.

  Greg’s most creative thinking sometimes occurred while luxuriating in a shower, as the pulsations of liquid heat stimulated his nervous system. He had surmised that the tactile white noise induced alpha brainwaves, those resonant frequencies revered by mystics who believe their rhythmic contractions birth visionary moments. Now, thoroughly relaxed by the cascading spray, he dreamily pictured the stream of water droplets morphing into a helical pattern of sparkling bubbles rising to the surface of the ocean. Some of those bubbles looked vaguely like the whale song circular patterns and shimmered more brightly than others. He imagined a constellation’s pinpoints of star-fire rising toward the zenith of the night sky. When the parade of stars burst through the water’s surface like a fountain of supernovas, his conscious mind was jolted by a revelation.

  “Eureka!”

  He exited the shower, toweled himself dry, and phoned his date to say he would likely be late. He donned a sweat suit, grabbed his wallet and keys, and dashed out the front door. In fifteen minutes he was back in the lab, typing commands into the Speakeasy computer workstation.

  Since Speakeasy’s user interface had been designed for inte
ractive sessions, the GUI featured several options for displaying the data. In order to prevent screen clutter for the streaming whale song data, Andrew had changed the default setting to refresh the display every thirty seconds. Greg disabled the setting so none of the symbols would be erased. This would allow him to observe if the symbols were correlated over a longer period of time, something he’d not done earlier.

  He cued the Speakeasy to the beginning of the section of ring-like figures. Despite his anticipation, nothing noteworthy appeared during the initial phase of the analysis. His disappointment grew as these new observations only confirmed his earlier finding: the random arrangement of the circular shapes, distributed uniformly, throughout all regions of the plot.

  As he stared at the screen, his heart started to pound. A pattern began to emerge. For the first time, he noted that symbols were sometimes “drawn” in a clockwise direction and at other times, counterclockwise. Subsequent symbols eventually appeared in clusters, their positioning limited to specific regions of the tone-pair frequency space. Their placement also seemed correlated with the location of the preceding symbol.

  “Could it possibly be?” he whispered. He snatched his mobile phone and punched in the speed-dial code for a math colleague. Despite the late afternoon hour, Joel Spelvin answered.

  “Hi, Joel. Greg here. I’m trying to solve an interesting problem, and I need a specialist. I hate to bother you on such short notice, but can you meet me in the Engineering Signal Processing Lab?” As was his habit, he maxed out the handset’s volume control setting.

  “Sure,” replied Spelvin, “but you’re going to owe me a dinner.”

  Greg pressed the phone tightly to his ear. “Absolutely, pal, but not tonight. Don’t forget to bring your laptop.” While he waited, he silenced the room’s loudspeakers so Spelvin wouldn’t be distracted by the whale songs.

  The graying mathematician arrived ten minutes later. “What’s up?” he asked as he booted up his laptop.

  Greg replayed the Speakeasy video while he summarized the nature of the problem, deliberately omitting any references to the source of the data. They worked in tandem to transfer the data coordinates of the circular figures from the Speakeasy program to Spelvin’s laptop.

  Ten minutes later, Spelvin ceremoniously waved a hand and poked the ENTER key. “The correlation analysis program should be completed in just a few seconds. Ah, there are the results.” He traced his fingertips across the contours of the plots of some squiggly lines that the application had painted onto the display. “Just as you hypothesized, it’s a classic correlation profile in both space and time coordinates. Initially the data is randomized. Eventually, however, both the auto- and cross-correlation coefficients monotonically increase through a transitional phase until the symbol-location profiles asymptotically approach 100% correlation. By the way, Greg, what’s the nature of the data we’re examining here?”

  Greg jumped up from the chair. As he rushed toward the lab’s exit doors, he shouted back at Spelvin, “Joel, just hang in there while I go fetch Dmitri!” He bolted through the double doors.

  Lacking the patience to wait a few seconds for an elevator, Greg raced up the three flights of stairs and sprinted down the empty hall to the front door of lecture room 300. Pausing to catch his breath, he peered through the peephole window, and saw Dmitri lecturing at the whiteboard. Greg knocked on the door, cracked it open a bit, and waved. Dmitri eyed his colleague with a quizzical expression. Greg pointed at the wall clock and then, with a slashing motion, waved an index finger across his throat. Dmitri responded immediately. He surprised his students, copying their next homework assignment onto the board and dismissing them ten minutes early.

  After the last of the students had filed out into the hall, Greg approached his colleague. “I can see from your expression you’re annoyed, and I don’t blame you.”

  “It’s more like perplexed. What’s this all about? I thought you’d gone home for your date.”

  “You’d better come with me. Spelvin is waiting for us in your lab.”

  Dmitri sighed. “But Joel Spelvin’s a game theorist. Why would he be involved?”

  “Because it turns out we needed to look not just at the shapes themselves.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s really about the relationship between the symbols, Spelvin’s specialty. Brace yourself, pal. You’re not gonna believe it.”

  “Believe what?” Dmitri fidgeted while he waited for an answer. “Tell me already.”

  “It’s . . . a . . . game.” Greg pronounced each word, incredulously, with equal emphasis.

  “A game?”

  Greg grasped him by the shoulders and shook him gently. “It’s the bloody whales. They’re playing a game!”

  Dmitri stared at the ceiling. “It’s not possible.”

  Greg held his friend’s arm and led him to the door. Dmitri’s later recollection of the subsequent events was vague. He barely remembered the trip back to the lab.

  Spelvin was flipping a coin into the air when the pair rushed through the doors. “Okay, gentlemen. Please keep me in suspense no longer. What’s the significance of the data I’ve been number crunching?”

  Greg glided over to the computer console and turned up the speaker volume. The hypnotic song of a humpback whale reverberated throughout the room.

  Spelvin crossed his arms. “Greg,” he said, “it’s awfully kind of you to entertain me with elevator Muzak, but I don’t believe you’ve answered my question.”

  Dmitri’s laugh was maniacal. Spelvin frowned and stared, openmouthed, as Dmitri convulsed with laughter. When Dmitri calmed himself enough to speak, he said, “Joel, this is Greg’s inimitable way of saying that you’re actually listening to the data right now.”

  Spelvin sounded annoyed. “Give me a break, guys. I don’t believe its April first, so what’s the gag here? All I know is that the results of the data I just analyzed fit the statistical profile of the strategy employed in a classic, two-player board game.”

  Dmitri approached Spelvin and murmured, “Please elaborate.”

  “Think of games like checkers, chess, or Go,” Spelvin answered. “There’s very little correlation at the beginning because players are cautious, not wanting to reveal their strategy. The initial moves appear random and are used to progress to empty spaces of the board to prepare for attack. Inevitably, there’s a transition period of gradual engagement marked by an increasing correlation between the attacker and defender. Finally, when the attack and defense begin in earnest, moves are highly correlated in space and with respect to the attackers’ and defenders’ preceding moves. So, are you saying I just confirmed that this matches the correlation profile of data from a whale song?”

  “I’ll show you.” Greg fiddled with the computer. “I’ll rewind to the beginning of the recording. Now listen and watch carefully.” He waited a while. “Don’t you see? The ring-shaped symbols plotted on the display, the data we just transferred to your laptop, correspond to the sounds we’re listening to!”

  The three men stared at one another. After another full minute of silence, Dmitri slid open the top drawer of a filing cabinet and removed a bottle of Scotch and three crystal tumblers. “Gentlemen, join me in a toast.”

  Spelvin stammered, “But, but—”

  “‘But, but—’ nothing,” insisted Dmitri. “I’m as flabbergasted as you are, but I can say with a hundred percent confidence we should pause to celebrate.” He poured the drinks. Raising their glasses in a toast, he announced, “The genie’s out of the bottle.”

  Greg slapped the side of his head. “Ouch. I forgot I have a date with Michelle tonight.”

  “And I need to phone Seema and Andrew to share the news,” said Dmitri. “Let’s meet tomorrow in the conference room at 9 a.m. sharp. Oh, and by the way, let’s keep this development under wraps for now.”

  Spelvin gasped, “But how—”

  “Tut-tut, Joel,” Dmitri interrupted. “I believe you need to loosen up wit
h another drink.” With a Cheshire Cat grin, he refilled Joel Spelvin’s glass.

  MEETING OF THE MINDS

  SoCalSci Department of Engineering, Main Conference Room—the next morning

  The bracing aroma of French Roast permeated the air, and exhilaration tinged by a halo of exhaustion charged the atmosphere of the SoCalSci Department of Engineering conference room. Less than twenty-four hours had elapsed since the electrifying discovery.

  The three professors huddled together in the center of the long, oval-ended conference table dominating the walnut-paneled room. Spelvin appeared pensive while Dmitri chatted with Greg. Facing them from the opposite side of the table, Seema and Andrew sipped the coffee Dmitri had brewed expressly for the occasion.

  Dmitri peered at his wristwatch. “I want to thank all of you for being on time. I phoned Seema and Andrew last night to brief them about our findings.”

  “When Dr. Dmitri phoned me with the news, I thought he was pulling my leg. Like a sorority initiation ritual.” Seema sounded giddy.

  “I’m embarrassed to admit I felt the same way.” Spelvin paused. He flipped a quarter into the air, swiveled his chair, and caught it behind his back to scattered applause. “My logical mind is screaming it can’t be true. Any minute now, I’m expecting to wake up from this dream.”

  “Look,” said Dmitri. “Even I need someone to pinch me, but we really need to come to grips with the situation. Joel, how about a recap of last night’s session?”