Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan is an artist-researcher and Faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working at the intersection of sound studies, multimodal cognition and emerging media . His practice explores non-human acoustic ecologies, bioacoustics, and sensory access through participatory platforms and interactive installations.
His research concerns the design of multimodal cognitive media interfaces, with the capacity to augment our perception of information in the surrounding world using multimodal cues, especially auditory and haptic interfaces that can augment visual and graphical mediums. His doctoral research employed a socio-technical design approach to overcome limitations imposed by the current industrial-medical model of innovation concerning assistive hearing technologies, that were a result of a history rooted in oralism and a visually dominant conception of hearing disability and speech perception. While recognizing the importance and need for a trans-disciplinary agenda, his research framework spans the fields of human-machine interaction design in virtual environments, cognitive psychology, auditory cognition, sound studies and the media arts.
https://experts.illinois.edu/en/persons/sharath-chandra-ramakrishnan