Comment by soulofmischief

This is referred to as equal temperament, but one can also use just intonation. Each approach comes with tradeoffs and Western music mostly decided that equal temperament was worth it because instruments can play in any key without retuning.

Just intonation also suffers from harmonic issues when building certain chords, but the tradeoff is that there isn't "beating", or resonant pulsing due to frequency mismatches, since in equal temperament, the notes are slightly detuned in order to fit into the scale, as you've mentioned. Another benefit of just intonation is that it's been observed to be the instinctive intonation used by humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation