Kedar Shashidhar ’15, ’16 (KEY), one of Rochester’s first audio and music engineering graduates, is on the forefront of three-dimensional sound.

As a high school student in Corning, New York, Kedar Shashidhar ’15, ’16 (KEY) was accepted into the Eastman School of Music for classical saxophone performance. His parents told him he could attend on one condition: that he coupled it with a degree in engineering.

Shashidhar complied, and was admitted as well into the College, where at a required orientation program for students who planned to study engineering, he learned about a soon-to-be-offered major in audio and music engineering.

Shashidhar knew this was the program for him. He withdrew from Eastman and became one of the very first audio and music engineering majors at Rochester.

Today, in addition to designing audio-only games at his studio, Blackout VR, Shashidhar puts his skills to work at OSSIC Studios, a Kickstarter-funded company in San Diego that’s developing three-dimensional audio headphones. As the company’s associate creative director, he has a range of responsibilities, from product and software tool development, to working directly with designers, musicians, and game developers, to building virtual reality experiences to showcase 3-D audio’s potential.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL: As both a musician and an engineer, Shashidhar is steeped in sound. When he’s not working to develop state-of-the-art 3-D headphones and audio-only games, the one-time classical saxophone student—and pioneering audio and music engineering major—sings in a San Diego barbershop quartet. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker/AP Images for Rochester Review)

What is three-dimensional audio?

Three-dimensional, or 3-D, audio is about experiencing sound as we hear it in the world. Think about it: sound exists in a particular location; it has directionality. In that way, 3-D audio allows us to experience truly immersive worlds while sitting at the movies, watching TV at home, playing a video game on a gaming console, phone, or computer, or listening to music through any type of device. Even while creating music or composing musical scores.

Can we hear 3-D audio now? If so, where?

It’s already creeping into our daily lives. For instance, Dolby is using it in music now. Games are also featuring it. YouTube and Facebook support 3-D audio now when watching 360 videos, too, but there’s a ways to go on the technology. Although you can plug in a normal pair of headphones and experience spatial audio from 360-video content that’s already there, you might experience spatial blur. This happens when you’re trying to pinpoint a sound source, but its location is unclear. It makes it difficult to tell if a sound is coming from in front or behind your head, or directly above or below it. These problems arise because the spatial audio is created using a model of the average human head and ears. In actuality, our individual anatomical differences are key to our ability to tell clearly where a sound is coming from.

Besides entertainment, what are potential applications for 3-D audio?

It’s certainly of particular interest to a number of industries, such as aerospace or military communication. Imagine, for example, that you’re a pilot. Sounds come from many directions inside the cockpit. When sounds are spread out so they aren’t coming from one source, our auditory comprehension improves, which can improve pilot reaction times.

Or, say you are on a Skype call with 12 other people from around the country. You hear voices on top of each other and it’s nearly impossible to distinguish them. With 3-D audio, you can distinguish among voices that are coming from in front of you, behind you, and to the left or right of you.

What special considerations are involved in developing 3-D headphones?

The OSSIC X headphones we’re developing are full of technology that “understands” the distinctive aspects of each listener’s anatomy—aspects like head shape and width—that help us figure out where sounds are coming from. An individual’s ear for example, is as unique as a fingerprint.

Our headphones also feature head-tracking technology. This helps users confirm where a sound is coming from. It’s like when we rotate our heads to get visual confirmation of where a sound is coming from. When we hear a car honking, for example, we turn our heads to locate the car. This head-tracking, paired with the headphone’s ear calibration, allows us to create accurate 3-D sound that actually lives outside of our heads. It’s the evolution of both the 3-D audio technology you might find on YouTube and the surround sound technology you might find in your movies.

NEW JOB, NEW CITY: Less than a year into her first post-college job, Zhang, who came to Rochester from Chongqing, China, has found her footing at Microsoft, and in her new hometown of Seattle. (Photo: Stephen Brashear/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Sophie Zhang ’17 is nine months into her first post-college job. Here’s what she’s learned so far.

What does your job involve?

I serve as a bridge between a few different groups, including our front-line customer support staff and our engineering group. Engineering might know how to develop a product, but not know about customer experience. Our customer support staff understand customer issues. I help engineers understand the customer, and I help the support organization identify issues in support processes and policies.

How did your education prepare you?

My engineering degree taught me problem-solving skills. I learned to tackle a lot of problems on my own. When I’m troubleshooting for customers, it’s different every time. I have to use whatever resources I have to solve them and I can draw on what I learned in college.

Soft skills help, too. I really honed these as a Meridian and an RA for Hoeing 2 during my senior year. At that time, my “clients” were students and families, and first-year students in the residence. Those jobs helped me be more empathic and more patient, which is very useful when dealing with customers.

How did you find the job?

I literally applied online. Two months later, I was invited for a phone interview. Then I was flown to an on-site interview in Dallas. I mock-interviewed with David Cota-Buckhout [at the Gwen M. Greene Career for Career Education and Connections]. We practiced together and he provided advice on how to improve. Altogether, I had four in-person interviews. I was offered the job before I graduated and was hired into the MACH program, which stands for Microsoft Academy for College Hires.

What were your first days like?

The first two months on the job were like going to college again. There were 200 of us in MACH’s services area. We trained together and we really bonded.

What do you like most about your job?

I love the mobility of the job. I get to hop around a bunch of projects and practice different strengths. I love talking to customers. I knew I didn’t want to code every day so this is a perfect fit for me. Also, I learn so much being a part of MACH, and I’ve made a lot of friends in the program. That made it easier to move to a new city.

What’s most challenging?

Dealing with a lot of ambiguities is really the hardest part of my job. There’s no GPA here. You have to deliver what you promise when sometimes what you are working on isn’t very well defined. Also, where my career is heading is entirely in my hands. That’s hard to practice at college. The path is much clearer there. You’re moving toward your degree.

What do you do when you aren’t at work?

Seattle is a lot of fun. It’s an outdoorsy city, so I go hiking a lot. Skiing, too. I keep meeting different people, including a few from the University who now work at Amazon, some actuarial firms, and other places around the city. I met them at a self-organized happy hour event in downtown Seattle. Being an alum gives me a built-in community wherever I go.

A son sets out to make an iphone app to communicate with his father.

C. Mike Lindsey ’08, ’09 (T5) harnesses his passion for improving systems as an urban agricultural entrepreneur.

AN ABSORBING PROJECT: With his partners at the start-up NexLoop, Lindsey helps develop systems that harness rain and fog for urban agricultural use—and that are integrated right into the built environment. (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

After working in veterinary medicine for seven years, C. Mike Lindsey ’08, ’09 (T5) was looking for a way to apply his knowledge of animals and biological systems that would have a greater impact.

He discovered it as cofounder of an urban agriculture start-up company.

The company, NexLoop, is the producer of AquaWeb, a system that can be retrofitted onto buildings and that emulates spider webs and cacti to harness rain and fog for use in urban farms. Last fall, NexLoop was awarded $100,000 in seed money at the Bioneers Conference in San Francisco after winning the Biomimicry Institute’s Global Design Challenge.

“We’re taking a whole systems approach to the local-food conversation,” says Lindsey, who lives in Brooklyn. “Where does your water come from? What if, even in a desert, we could think about irrigation as little as we think about breathing?”

Municipal water is cheap, but there are problems in New York City and many other cities with outdated sewer systems. “If it rains, the streets are flooded within 10 minutes, causing debris to flow directly into surrounding waterways,” he says.

Creating soil-based green roofs and other absorptive infrastructure soaks up water and harnesses a free resource for urban farmers. “It also allows an off-the-grid farmer in rural Montana to gather their own water for less than the cost of a well,” he adds.

Lindsey is accustomed to thinking broadly, and to making connections across disciplines that might elude others. During his sophomore year at Rochester, the Wisconsin native created an interdisciplinary major called “integrative neurobiology,” studying the biological and neurological factors contributing to animal behavior and cognition.

“I started taking classes in brain and cognitive sciences and psychology and got pulled into the neuroscience world,” he says. He spent a fifth year completing a Take Five program called “Understanding Bilingual Representation,” in which he analyzed how language is organized in the brain.

His Take Five advisor was Jeffrey Runner, a professor of linguistics and now dean of the College.

“I remember C. Mike as someone who was very creative and very outgoing,” Runner says. “He got the most out of his Rochester experience.”

Lindsey had long wanted to be a veterinarian, and sought experience in the field after graduation. In roles at veterinary hospitals and zoos, “I helped with everything from diabetic cats, to dogs hit by cars, to an anteater’s endoscopy, and even autopsies on endangered species like a clouded leopard and a maned wolf,” he says. The work fascinated him, but “it’s a stressful field and really tough emotionally.”

Not one to limit his pursuits, Lindsey was at the same time following Brooklyn Grange—the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the world—on Instagram. In 2015, he added an apprenticeship there to his routine, as a change of pace.

“It was idyllic, and a stark contrast to stressful days in the emergency room,” he says. “At 5 a.m., I’d watch the sun rise over the New York skyline while picking tomatoes and salad greens in the middle of the city.”

A friend from Rochester connected Lindsey with Jacob Russo, a recent Carnegie Mellon graduate who is completing a master’s program in biomimetic architecture in Germany. They teamed with Anamarija Frankic, an ecology research professor in Croatia who specializes in coastal water ecosystems. NexLoop was formed.

Lindsey’s life course—from Rochester to veterinary work to his role at NexLoop, focused on business and customer development—may seem like it’s taken twists and turns. And yet, some basic elements have been pretty constant. “The common thread in all of this,” he says, “is that I really enjoy using different perspectives to improve systems.”

This story originally appeared in the winter 2018 issue of Rochester Review.