Music Annotation Specialist

About the Role

We're hiring trained musicians to produce detailed, accurate annotations of musical audio. The work demands a sharp ear, solid theory, and the ability to describe what's happening in an arrangement in the precise, shared language that musicians use with each other.

What You'll Do

Listen closely to musical clips and produce clear, faithful descriptions of form, instrumentation, harmony, rhythm, melody, production, and transitions. You'll separate individual parts within an arrangement, catch quiet, brief, overlapping, or changing details, and keep your judgment consistent across a clip and across a batch — describing audible evidence precisely, without adding assumptions the audio doesn't support.

Baseline Expectations

All annotators must:

• Listen critically enough to hear quiet, brief, overlapping, and changing musical details, and separate individual parts within the arrangement.
• Describe audible evidence clearly and concisely without adding unsupported assumptions.
• Stay focused and apply the same judgment throughout a clip and across a batch.

Required Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in music with a focus on composition or music theory.
• At least 1 year of hands-on music production experience. Parts of the task require fine-grained music theory understanding, and we expect fine granularity in descriptions.
• Resume screening required. Beyond project quality checks, candidates must pass resume screening. General music interest or genre familiarity is not enough.

Skills Verified During Screening

Vendors should verify during screening that candidates can:

• Form and section function. Identify musical form and section function by ear, including song sections and neutral forms.
• Instrumentation and arrangement roles. Identify instrumentation, playing technique, and arrangement roles such as groove, bass line, pad, lead, counter-melody, fills, and instrumental or vocal entries and exits.
• Harmonic analysis by ear. Analyze harmony at the level supported by the audio, including chord progressions, chord names, pedal points, cadences, key changes, and modulations.
• Harmonic roles of individual instruments. Identify what each instrument is doing harmonically (e.g., "the violin carries the main motif in rapid staccato notes…").
• Rhythm and meter. Identify rhythm, groove, meter or feel, drum patterns, syncopation, half-time and double-time relationships, tempo changes, and the tempo a listener would naturally tap.
• Melody and texture. Describe melody, hooks, contour, repetition, call and response, vocal style, dynamics, texture, builds, drops, crescendos, layering, and density changes.
• Production techniques. Recognize reverb, delay, distortion, filtering, sidechain effects, stereo image, and lo-fi versus polished treatment.
• Transitions. Recognize fills, risers, stops, cuts, fades, hard edits, starts, endings, and movement into the next section.
• Musician-to-musician writing. Produce clear, concise descriptions of what's happening in an arrangement in language another musician would read and immediately understand.