Talking about tuning guitars in another thread reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago.

Would it be possible to make a self-tuning acoustic guitar?

I'm not talking about one of those electronic gizmos that pretends a guitar is in tune when it isn't.

What I had in mind was some sort of electronically controlled stepper motors attached to the machine heads, which would move the tuning slightly up or down as required, to keep the guitar in tune as you play. The frequency of each string would be constantly monitored and if it was detected to be out of tune, the motors would adjust the strings accordingly. Of course you could programme it to allow for different tunings.

I can't be the first person to think of this, but I haven't seen any such guitar. So why wouldn't this be possible?

"If we can put a man on the moon, etc., etc...." :-)