Welcome

Hello, I am Ben. Welcome to my website. If you are interested in learning a little bit about me, you’ve come to the right place! (For example, if you want to know a fun fact about me, FYI I get up every day at 4:00am, and I could not imagine a life where I was not at the gym at 5:30am.)

I live in beautiful northeastern Ohio with my beautiful family, and I am a piano teacher, open source software developer, yoga teacher, writer, inventor and athlete.

Professionally I work as an embedded firmware engineer. I am also affiliated with the University of Akron, where I am an part-time student, as well as a yoga teacher in the Student Recreation and Wellness Center; I call my class “Yoga for Mind Body Connection”, and I describe it like this:

Yoga for Mind Body Connection” is a gentle, holistic introduction to the traditional yoga practices of pranayama (breath control), asana (posture), and dharana (present-moment-based awareness.) Each beginner-friendly 45-minute session aims to unify the body, mind, & spirit, and to increase mental and emotional well-being by exploring the ancient science of yoga.

I play the piano at the Unitarian Universalist in my hometown of Kent, Ohio for the 9am service. So if you ever want to hear me play and/or join a beautiful community of people, stop by anytime. Remember: whoever you are, whoever you love, we welcome you!

I have been very blessed to have experienced significant international travel, most significantly to India on four occasions, which has changed my life.

My own spiritual awakening began in Silchar, India way back in 2011, and my most recent trip — a month long residential stay in Swargashram in Rishikesh at the Nada School of Traditional Yoga — was a life-changing experience.

My exposure to, and embrace of, the traditional spirituality of India, and in particular, the Hindu concepts of Dharma, Ishvara, and Bhakti Yoga have made me the man who I am today.

It is not my intention to tell others what to believe, but if I had to give my advice — for sure I would say: please chant Hare Krishna and Be Happy.

Additionally, I would like to dedicate my website to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the man who brought knowledge to my country.


In 2024, I am running the Akron Marathon to raise money for charity. I am also performing at the Farmer’s Market in Kent, Ohio to raise money as well.

In June of this year, I am hosting a fund-raising concert to honor the memory of my piano teacher Nicholas Constantinidis. At the concert, my software company will be handing out several scholarships which we are funding.

And finally (if that’s not enough for you) yes I have my own Kirtan Band, called Kundalini.Software. (KundaliniSoftware.com is the name of my startup company; Kundalini.Software is the name of my Kirtan Band.)

I am also a long time student and contributor to the Lightning Path System of Self Actualization, which is a modern framework for connecting to higher consciousness.

Kundalini Piano Platform

My free time is spend developing my Kundalini Piano Platform, which is the novel piano educational system that I’ve developed with funding from a National Science Foundation grant.

My system works with digital pianos, and has several novel pedagogical and music-making features.

The first is that it creates a mirror-image digital keyboard; this promotes true ambidexterity by allowing students to utilize what is known as symmetrical inversion to learn to play melodies with equal facility in either hand. (For more information on this, please see my explanation here.)

Next, the Kundalini Piano Platform makes a digital piano scriptable, so as to teach computer programming as part of musical education. (Please see here for a further explanation and an example.)

Lastly, for use with my system, I created my own transpiler that I call the Mozart Transposition Engine that can create mirror-image scores. (See the special edition of the Bach 13 2-part inventions that I created with my transpiler to see what mirror-image scores look like. A simpler example featuring an excerpt from Mozart’s Concert Rondo can be seen here.)

GitHub

The source to some of my cooler open source projects on GitHub can be browsed online using the awesome tool github1s.com

You can find more information on the software I write on my other website, Kundalini Software, or by checking out my GitHub profile.

Writings

A complete list of my writings can be found here.

Just for Fun

Finally, if you would like to see a video that I made using my awesome visualization engine, check this out. The video expresses my sentiment when I first got back from India, and is described by the poem I wrote to go along with it:

RamaKrishna is supreme Freedom / an unfathomable ocean of eternal bliss / enticingly beckoning all people / to please find her / and make her your own.

Thanks for visiting; please have a nice day.