Archive
IJMSTA - Vol. 8 - Issue 2 - July 2026
ISSN 2612-2146
Pages: 6
Similarity and Coherence of Album Cover Designs Across Progressive Rock Subgenres
Authors: Kodai Kitagawa, Toshifumi Tanaka
Categories: Journal
Abstract - Album cover design plays a key role in expressing the aesthetic characteristics of popular music. It is generally recognized that album cover designs reflect distinctive features of major music genres. However, little research has focused on album cover design within more specific and complex genres such as progressive rock. Understanding album cover design in progressive rock is valuable because the genre encompasses diverse subgenres. The objective of this study is to investigate the similarity of album cover designs across subgenres within progressive rock. In this study, album cover classification was conducted for five subgenres-eclectic prog, jazz rock and fusion, progressive metal, psychedelic and space rock, and symphonic prog-to examine the similarity of visual design among them. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was employed for this task, as previous studies have demonstrated its effectiveness in recognizing album cover designs in other music genres. A total of 500 album cover images were used, with 70% allocated for training and 30% for testing. The results showed that CNN achieved an overall classification accuracy of only 30% across the five subgenres. This relatively low accuracy suggests that there are similarities and coherence in album cover design among progressive rock subgenres.
Keywords: Album Cover Design,
Coherence,
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
Popular Music,
Progressive Rock,
Similarity
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