  The annotation of music content is a complex process to represent due to its
inherent multifaceted, subjectivity, and interdisciplinary nature. Numerous
systems and conventions for annotating music have been developed as independent
standards over the past decades. Little has been done to make them
interoperable, which jeopardises cross-corpora studies as it requires users to
familiarise with a multitude of conventions. Most of these systems lack the
semantic expressiveness needed to represent the complexity of the musical
language and cannot model multi-modal annotations originating from audio and
symbolic sources. In this article, we introduce the Music Annotation Pattern,
an Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) to homogenise different annotation systems and
to represent several types of musical objects (e.g. chords, patterns,
structures). This ODP preserves the semantics of the object's content at
different levels and temporal granularity. Moreover, our ODP accounts for
multi-modality upfront, to describe annotations derived from different sources,
and it is the first to enable the integration of music datasets at a large
scale.
