Ben Ma

What can music do to bring the world together?

With skills in software engineering, machine learning, academic research, leadership, and music production, my goal is to promote international relationships through cross-cultural music sharing.

I built Pindrop, a multicultural music discovery game designed to break through attention inertia and spark curiosity in unheard music. I also built Chimera, a cross-market music recommender that does what Spotify & other major platforms don’t: recommend songs from around the globe based on the musical content of what you like, not what other people listen to.

I conducted music emotion recognition research using machine learning techniques at USC CCMI, then joined Schwarzman Scholars in 2021-22 to study U.S.-China popular music exchange at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 2022, I joined Amazon Alexa as a software development engineer, working on NLU conversation flow intelligence. In 2023, I left Amazon to join music tech startup Rivet as their first full-stack software engineer, developing a fan engagement platform to guide and empower independent music artists in building their fan communities.

Based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.