About me

Yep, that's me. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal Holloway University of London in the Department of Computer Science. When I first conceived this map, I was doing my PhD at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Measurement and Information Systems. That's in Hungary, by the way - the small Central-European country where everyone eats goulash, at least according to some foreigners. My research projects are primarily related to complex networks: large interconnected systems, where individual entities are connected by binary links arranged in seemingly random but intrinsically structured patterns. Music, my other primary interest is just like that; artists are the entities and their similarity relationships are the connections between them. The visualisations on these pages are based on this very simple idea, and I am really grateful to the guys and girls at Last.fm for making some of their data available through the Audioscrobbler API and for not banning the IP address of my computer when they noticed that I have been sending requests for more than a week in every five seconds.

Speaking about music, I mostly listen to the dark gray and red parts of the map, with occasional excursions to the orange and brown territory. I am a keen user of Last.fm; my username is ntamas, so if you have something to say, send me a message there. I also have a one-man music project called In Silence; it's something like instrumental metal without lyrics (and grunts) but with occasional synth solos on a cheap VST-based Minimoog emulator. The guitar is a not-so-cheap-but-not-expensive-at-all Ibanez GRX-170 (not the one on the picture, that's a Johnson electro-acoustic guitar), and the whole stuff is put together using Renoise on a Mac. Drums are sampled, so if you play drums and have some time to play the drum tracks for me, don't hesitate to drop me a mail.