Look and Listen

Biography

Patricia Rockwell has spent most of her life teaching. From small liberal arts colleges to large regional research universities—and even a brief stint in a high school, her background in education is extensive. She has taught virtually everything related to Communication—from a fine arts speech-theatre orientation to more recently a social science research approach. Her Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees are from the University of Nebraska in Speech and her Ph.D. is from the University of Arizona in Communication. She was on the faculty at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for thirteen years, retiring in 2007. Her publications are extensive, with over 20 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals, several textbooks, and a research book on her major interest area of sarcasm, published by Edwin Mellen Press. In addition to publications, she has presented numerous papers at academic conferences and served for eight years as Editor of the Louisiana Communication Journal. Her research focuses primarily on several areas of communication: deception, sarcasm, and vocal cues. Dr. Rockwell is presently living in Aurora, Illinois, with her husband Milt, also a retired educator. The couple have two adult children. SOUNDS OF MURDER is her first novel.

Inspiration

I've always loved mysteries--from reading Nancy Drew as a child through Agatha Christie as I got older, I was drawn to clever women who solved puzzles. That may be part of the reason I found myself as a communication researcher when I taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for many years. All of my research had a central thread--sound, particularly the sound of the human voice. I was fascinated by what peoples' voices said about them--and often the sound of their voices said more than their words alone. My dissertation focused on differences in accuracy between acoustic technology and human coders in determining the veracity of both liars and truthtellers using vocal cues alone. Since then, I've investigated many other sound/voice related phenomena such as sarcasm. I use all of the knowledge and insights I developed in my years of conducting scientific experiments in my fiction writing. Indeed, my first mystery "Sounds of Murder" focuses on an amateur sleuth who uses acoustic technology to track down a killer. I have many ideas for intriguing crimes that can be solved using such acoustic technology and I hope these ideas will keep my protagonist Pamela busy for many books to come.