Analysis of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Album
In this post I will mix the cognitive computing with my music passion: to analysis of the Beatles’s Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band cover album.
Sergeant Pepper’s was recorded in December 1966. It was groundbreaking for two reasons: first one the use and development of music technology, second one it was a concept album.
It has the most famous rock album cover of all time, the concept for the cover was called people we like.
According to artist Peter Blake, the designer of the iconic Sgt. Pepper cover: “In my mind I was making a piece of art rather than an album cover. It was almost a piece of theater design.”
Each of the four Beatles was told to compile a list of people they admired, and their choices would all be featured on the album’s cover. Ringo, always the least pretentious of the four, declined right off the bat. “Whoever the others choose is okay with me,” Ringo said.
John Lennon’s off-kilter mind immediately came up with Adolf Hitler and Mohandas Gandhi. Hitler was immediately nixed for obvious reasons. But, incredibly, a paper cutout of Adolf Hitler was actually made and was there at the photo session on March 30, 1967. Legend has it that Hitler was actually in the final shot, but during the session, one of the Beatles stood in front of him, covering the camera’s view. Gandhi got the axe by EMI executives, believing it would hurt album sales in the Far East.
George, “the mystic Beatle,” of course, chose four Indian gurus. Bob Dylan was a clear choice by all the Beatles, who worshiped Dylan.
Fred Astaire was definitely a “Paul” choice. The legendary dancer was an easy sell and was reportedly delighted to be featured. However, despite Paul’s initial assurance to EMI that all the requested “guests” would “love to do anything to please us,” several of the chosen figures gave EMI more than a bit of difficulty. Shirley Temple asked to hear the finished product produced before giving her consent.
I analyzed the cover by cognitive services, the first part of my analysis I countered the faces number on the cover using the Face Recognition service:
According the computer vision service the number of faces is about 46 but, the number is slightly less because some faces are too close and they are not drawn in very clear way.
The second test is about the age of the person inside the cover, here is the result about the Fab Four:
Moreover I used the Computer Vision to recognize the celebrities on the cover. Who are all the people on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover?
Of course the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover has definitely too many celebrities, for sure there are: Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde !
The last analysis is about the sentiment expressed by the Fab Fours, for this cover the sentiment is neutral
To summarize the computer vision uses algorithms to automatically analyze imagery and extract knowledge from the visual world. This knowledge is used for additional research projects such as the transformation of depth and scene data into three-dimensional renderings and the intelligent synthesis of labels for people, places and things into scene descriptions and calls to action.
Computer vision is multidisciplinary, routinely serving visual processing and analytic components to ambitious projects such as the development of personal robots, self-driving cars and autonomous drones.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are widely embraced in efforts to automate computer vision tasks such as 3D recovery, facial and object recognition, image and video captioning, biometric security, medical imaging and video enhancement.
