[BurningFrog]

I understand that pianos have to pick a frequency for each key.

I wonder if there is any effort in electronic instruments to produce "better" frequencies on the fly? I'll explain:

On a piano hitting C+G plays something close to a perfect fifth.

An electronic instrument could move the G slightly to produce a perfect fifth when that key combination is played.

[mhax]

It's not just a matter of 'better' frequencies. It's trivial to have a softsynth or something similar set up to use just intonation (and many modern composers have experimented with this), but that has practical problems of it's own. Problems which were the very reason that equal temperement took over in the first place. This page has some wonderful examples http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/asn/homepage/teaching/exp-l...

[jpitz]

You cant do that, without a large effort in music education or ensembles of all electronic instruments implementing this feature. Everyone else will be out of tune.

Edit: you could do it, but you'd better implement it on a feedback system that can re-tune in a hundred milliseconds or so.

[BurningFrog]

I'm just talking about an individual keyboard, though if all instruments are digital, which is pretty common these days, you could have a whole orchestra dynamically adjusting pitch to make "perfect" harmonies.

What I wonder is mostly if that would sound any better.