Music & Sound Annotation Expert

Role overview

Role Type: Contractor Location: Remote micro1 is engaging Music & Sound Annotation Experts to contribute to a customer's project at the forefront of music and audio technology. Your ears are the ground truth. You'll listen to short field recordings and document exactly what's audible — instruments, tempo, key, background sounds, crowd reactions — through a structured web platform built for this project. Later phases involve grading AI model answers against what you actually heard. What you'll do • Listen to 30–90 second field recordings (headphones, your own quiet workspace) and complete structured annotations: which instruments are present, tempo and key, timestamps of background events (traffic, sirens, applause), scene details • Compare paired recordings of the same song captured at different locations and judge what stayed the same and what changed • In later phases: review AI model descriptions of clips and mark what's correct, wrong, or invented, with a brief written explanation • Attend a paid onboarding/calibration session and a short weekly sync Who we're looking for (any of these backgrounds) • Working or gigging musicians, session players, producers, or mixing engineers • Music educators, ear-training instructors, band/choir directors, conservatory students or graduates • Location sound recordists, sound designers, foley artists, or podcast/documentary audio editors

Requirements & qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on music or audio experience • Strong analytical listening: you can pick individual instruments out of a busy, noisy, real-world mix — not just studio recordings • Can identify tempo (within a few BPM) and musical key (relative pitch with a reference is fine) • Comfortable with detail-oriented, repetitive annotation work in a web platform — dropdowns, timestamps, short structured notes • Clear written English for brief, evidence-based notes (e.g., "accordion enters around 0:12") • Quality headphones, quiet workspace, reliable internet • Available 20–25 hrs/week for the engagement window

Skills

• Analytical listening
• Music theory knowledge
• Audio annotation
• Attention to detail
• Written communication