Ben Carson specializes in theory and composition; music cognition and consciousness; rhythm and voice leading; and the history of musical subjects. A composer/theorist, he engages a variety of scientific and critical 'theories of mind' in order to investigate consciousness in music. He has developed cognition-oriented approaches to form and rhythm; he also examines those issues through lenses of critical gender and race studies. In the DANM program, Carson hopes to encourage artists to consider the deterministic relationship of particular media and technologies to their constituent 'percepts', 'affects', and 'concepts.'

His graduate work was conducted at the University of Washington and at the University of California at San Diego. Carson is recognized for excellence in research and teaching, and won first prize in composition (2001) from the British and International Bass Society. His music has been performed throughout the U.S., at numerous international festivals, including Aspen and Buffalo, the Sydney Conservatory's Music and Social Justice conference, and at the New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for the Contemporary Piano. A series of essays addressing Carson's piano music is published in Issue 5 of the Open Space magazine.

Carson has collaborated in projects at the Institute de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, and at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, and he has lectured in the series Perception et Cognition Auditives (Paris Université VI), and at other international colloquia in cultural studies, psychoacoustics, and music theory. Carson's writing also appears in ECHO, the Journal of New Music Research, the Institute for Advanced Feminist Studies' Shock and Awe: War on Words, and in theAmerican Journal of Psychology.