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Has anybody tried dynamically changing the tuning of an electronic instrument, so that when you play a fifth or another chord, the individual notes are exactly tuned so that the chord is itself perfectly tuned? Basically a per-chord adaptive tuning kind of thing. Or would that sound bad in another way.

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No need for electronics. Fretless string instruments, trombones, the human voice, and most any wind instrument with a good player can bend the notes sufficiently to achieve whatever precise pitches you want and hit these perfect intervals. A typical piano doesn't have a way to bend the pitches on a whim.

All that said, perfect tuning can only happen with certain types of chords, and music that used only those perfectly tuned chords would be quite boring in general. There are so many more combinations that still sound "good". Part of what makes music interesting is building and releasing tension over time, and one way to do that is with chords that don't hit these perfect intervals.

As for the piano and other instruments like it, centuries of good composers have found all sorts of ways to take advantage of its particular idiosyncrasies, both alone and with all sorts of combinations of instruments. And it's not just old classical artists: in the 20th and 21st centuries, there are plenty of geniuses who have and continue to find new ways to bring out what makes the piano such an interesting instrument. Debussy broke all the conventional wisdom of his day to make the most beautifully resonant piano pieces. Check out Nancarrow's player piano pieces on YouTube to see the instrument taken to a ludicrous extreme; John Cage's piano pieces often go all the way in the other direction; Steve Reich's Piano Phase is a brilliant exploration of how we hear piano music; and finally, compare John Adams's China Gates (a solo piece) with Century Rolls (a concerto) for very different approaches from the same composer.

> A typical piano doesn't have a way to bend the pitches on a whim.

There are a few keyboard-ish instruments that allow this, and they're super fun and expressive:

- Roli Seaboard (https://roli.com/products/seaboard/)

- Haken Continuum (https://www.hakenaudio.com/continuum-fingerboard)

- Linnstrument (http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html, more like a guitar layout than a keyboard)

Indeed, when you get very far outside of keyboard instruments, there is no "temperament," but merely a scale that's good enough for most purposes, evolved over time. And a better instrument might have a better scale. Players "lip" the notes up and down. Brass instruments have little tuning slides -- it's fascinating to watch a master play the tuba. Whether or not you activate these devices depends on how fast the passage is, and whether anybody is likely to notice.

Are you saying that you can sing a little bit out of tune and still sound good?

If the passage is fast enough, yes. Of course "a little bit out of tune" for a master is still pretty darn accurate.

This could be done, but as a question it's malformed. Musically, the same interval may appear in an ambiguous set of contexts: sure, it might be part of a chord, but it's also a counter point line that just happens to be crossing another in a way that sounds interesting. You can tune the chord right only by mucking with the scale of the counter point melody. Probably half of music is the practice of crafting ambiguities like this.

There is plenty of music that stays within a single key and exploits proper rational tuning -- go listen to barbershop, for example. Voices can do this trivially (so can a handful of other instruments -- trombones come to mind), it's only devices with fixed strings or holes that are tied to equal temperment.

Yes, there are dozens of adaptive tuning techniques that have been implemented.

One of these, Hermode, has been included by default in Apple Logic since Logic Pro 7 (2004). Steinberg Cubase has also implemented Hermode since Cubase 7 (2012).

"Three Ears" by William Sethares is an example piece for his book "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" that demonstrates this:

http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/Three_Ears.mp3

"As each new note sounds, its pitch (and that of all currently sounding notes) is adjusted microtonally (based on its spectrum) to maximize consonance. The adaptation causes interesting glides and microtonal pitch adjustments in a perceptually sensible fashion."

The melodyne software will do this with vocals, but I believe it requires a lot of manual intervention. Melodyne will "auto-tune" vocals and that sometimes sounds really weird in equal temperament since vocalists will fluidly switch between equal temperament and other modes of intonation depending on accompaniment context.

In Wendy Carlos' "Switched On Bach" albums the tunings are carefully constructed depending on context.

For a more radical approach see also her "Beauty in the beast", which uses nonstandard systems.

Perfectly tuned to what chord? What if you play a stevie wonder tune where there is non-funcitonal harmony i.e. all the little tunings would be jumping all over the place

See: barbershop quartets.

It's one of the things that makes acapella music in general sound so good. A good acapella ensemble is focused on making each chord perfectly in tune. Singers aren't thinking of the temperament of their scales, they're thinking of the resonance of their harmonies.

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