Multimed Tools Appl (2013) 65:467–494 DOI 10.1007/s11042-012-1042-z Adaptive music retrieval – a state of the art Sebastian Stober · Andreas Nürnberger Published online: 6 March 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Abstract With the development of more and more sophisticated Music Information Retrieval approaches, aspects of adaptivity are becoming an increasingly important research topic. Even though, adaptive techniques have already found their way into Music Information Retrieval systems and contribute to robustness or user satisfaction they are not always identified as such. This paper attempts a structured view on the last decade of Music Information Retrieval research from the perspective of adaptivity in order to increase awareness and promote the application and further development of adaptive techniques. To this end, different approaches from a wide range of application areas that share the common aspect of adaptivity are identified and systematically categorized. Keywords Music information retrieval · Adaptive systems · Survey · Overview 1 Introduction Why is adaptivity interesting in the context of Music Information Retrieval (MIR)? Even though the term “adaptive” does not appear directly in recent surveys by Orio [69] and Casey et al. [14] nor in the analysis of the “ISMIR cloud” by Grachten et al. [27], adaptivity is a core element of many Music Information Retrieval applications. Whilst not (yet) being a primary research topic in Music Information Retrieval, studying adaptivity has a long tradition in the field of control theory [1, 58], artificial neural networks and nature-inspired systems in general [25, 53]. In classic (text) information retrieval the term “adaptive information retrieval” was coined in the late eighties by Belew [6] and with “adaptive hypermedia” a whole S. Stober (B ) · A. Nürnberger Data & Knowledge Engineering Group, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Universitätsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany e-mail: stober@ovgu.de