Music & Sound Annotation Expert

What you'll do

Your ears set the ground truth. The recordings are short real-world field recordings of 30 to 90 seconds, not clean studio stems, and you annotate them in a structured web tool: which instruments you can hear, tempo and key, timestamps for background events like traffic, sirens or applause, and details of the scene.

A second task pairs recordings of the same song captured at different locations and asks what held constant and what changed, which is really a test of how well you separate the music from the room and the crowd. In later phases the job flips to evaluation: you read an AI model's description of a clip and mark each claim correct, wrong or invented, with a short explanation.

There is a paid onboarding and calibration session and a short weekly sync.

Who fits

The ad names three routes in; any one will do:

• Working or gigging musicians, session players, producers or mixing engineers
• Music educators, ear-training teachers, band or choir directors, conservatory students or graduates
• Location sound recordists, sound designers, foley artists, or podcast and documentary audio editors

And sets these requirements:

• 3+ years of hands-on music or audio experience
• Picking individual instruments out of a busy, noisy live mix, not just a studio recording
• Tempo to within a few BPM, and key (relative pitch with a reference note is fine, so no perfect pitch needed)
• Patience for repetitive, detail-heavy work in dropdowns and timestamps
• Clear written English for short evidence-based notes, of the "accordion enters around 0:12" kind
• Good headphones, a quiet room and reliable internet
• 20–25 hours a week for the engagement window

What it pays

$30–45/hour, micro1's published band. It is a narrow band, so the offer should land close to it. No compensation structure is stated beyond that, and the onboarding session is explicitly paid. At 20–25 hours a week that is a meaningful part-time income for a working musician, and the band is lower than most of micro1's expert-evaluation roles.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Open to gigging musicians and students as well as credentialed audio professionals
• Relative pitch is enough; the ad says so
• Paid onboarding and calibration
• A narrow pay band, so less guesswork
• Concrete, well-described tasks

Less good:

• A fixed 20–25 hours a week is a real commitment alongside gigs or teaching
• Ten openings only
• Noisy field recordings are tiring to annotate for hours at a time
• The length of the engagement window is not stated
• Contractor engagement: no benefits, no notice period, your own tax to manage

About this listing

Posted by micro1 on its own jobs portal and read on 24 September 2026, about three weeks after it went up. The $30–45/hour band, ten openings, weekly hours and requirements above are its published text. No country restriction is stated and the customer is described only as working in music and audio technology. See micro1.