Robert Moog, who died Sunday at 71, was an electronics tinker who invented and named the Moog synthesizer, the touchstone for a revolution in sound production that has reached every corner of music.

The Moog synthesizer was an analog device, quite different from the ubiquitous digital electronics of today’s popular music and home recording studios. Yet the Moog’s characteristic sounds were extremely influential, from its earliest uses by the Monkees and the Beatles, the mid-1970s excesses of Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and on through progressive jazz, funk, and especially disco, where it generated synthesized drum tracks for hits like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

By this time Moog, never much of a businessman, had left the company that bore his name. While on tour in the early 1970s, Keith Emerson proudly used a 10-foot-tall, 550-pound “Monster Moog,” but more compact models produced by Yamaha, Arp, Roland, and other companies came to dominate the field.

Known for his close attention to the needs of musicians, Moog later worked on devices that wedded analog and digital technologies, such as touch sensitive keyboards that could respond sonically to lateral finger motions, and a piano that transcribed notes played onto a video screen.

In 2002, Moog regained the rights to put his name on synthesizers, which conveniently had been rediscovered by a new generation of popular musicians. He reissued the “Minimoog,” the portable model that was his most popular design. With his dry engineer’s wit, Moog once said that the chief advantage of the Minimoog was that it “would make it a lot easier to get a job playing the local Ramada Inn.” He was not exactly wrong.

Moog grew up in Flushing, the son of a piano teacher and an electronic engineer at Consolidated Edison. He never took to his mother’s piano lessons – she “klopped” him when he didn’t practice – but his father’s knack for tinkering rubbed off on him. By the time he was 14, Moog, a self-described math nerd and target for bullies at Bronx High School of Science, had built his first theremin, the spooky space-age instrument heard in science fiction films and in the Beach Boys hit “Good Vibrations.”

Moog and his father set up a company building theremins in their home while Moog studied engineering at Columbia University. He also did custom work for Raymond Scott, an electronic music pioneer remembered today primarily for his compositions used in Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoons. Moog eventually incorporated transistors into his theremins and sold them as do-it-yourself mail-order kits.

Later, while pursuing his Ph.D. in electronic engineering at Cornell University, Moog worked with the composer Herbert Deutsch on a keyboard-controlled synthesizer. When he demonstrated it at a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society Convention in 1964 and was unexpectedly deluged with orders, he set up a factory outside Ithaca to produce synthesizers while completing his degree. In 1966, he coined the term “synthesizer” to replace his inelegant previous term for the devices, “breadboard.”

The first models – banks of dials sprouting great tangles of patchcords – went to recording studios and academic institutions. Among the innovations that made the synthesizer popular with musicians was its use of the “attack-decay-sustain-release envelope” that controls the way notes begin, swell, and fade; and the “low-pass filter” that allowed the synthesizer to mimic the timbres of a variety of string, woodwind, brass, and other instruments.

The Moog synthesizer gained popularity quickly, and a new generation of synthesizer composers began to emerge, including Steve Reich, Morton Subotnick, and Terry Riley. But it was the release of Walter Carlos’s “Switched-On Bach” that propelled the synthesizer into the cultural limelight in 1968. No less than Glenn Gould raved (or perhaps he was being snotty), “It’s a bit surprising that the record of the year (no, let’s go all the way – the decade!) is an unembarrassed compote of Bach’s greatest hits … that not even the Reader’s Digest could have topped. … The whole record, in fact, is one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation, certainly one of the great feats in the history of ‘keyboard’ performance, and the surest evidence, if evidence be needed, that live music never was best.”

After a sex-change operation, Mr. Carlos became Wendy Carlos and went on to produce the startling electronic Beethoven soundtrack for “A Clockwork Orange.” A mini-Moog craze ensued, with hopeful entries including “Country Moog,” “Moog Strikes Back,” and the jazzy “Moog Indigo.” More memorable were Moog appearances in mainstream pop music, including songs by the Beatles (“Because”), the Who (“Won’t Get Fooled Again”), Stevie Wonder (“Livin’ for the City”), Kraftwerk, and many others.

When demand for his synthesizers slackened – the full-size ones retailed for $12,000 each – his business promptly fell apart. Rights to the synthesizer business were sold, and by 1977 Moog severed all ties to it. Moog continued to do research and development for his own company, Big Briar, and was also in charge of new product research for Kurzweil Music Systems.

He settled in Asheville, N.C., where he was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina as research professor of music. In the 1990s, Big Briar produced the Moogerfooger, which mimics analog synthesizer timbres for digital media, and the Ethervox, a kind of digital theremin.

Bands like Stereolab and Radiohead helped revive the popularity of Moog synthesizers, which went from being doorstops and flea market finds to expensive antiques. In 2001, Moog was awarded the Swedish Polar Music Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and the following year he won a Grammy for Technical Achievement. In 2004, a documentary was released about his career, titled “Moog.”

Synthesizer music is generally thought of as machine music, and there are those who hold that most of it is fit mainly to be listened to by other machines. Moog held a surprising view of music for one who so strongly influenced the recording industry.

“Before the radio and the phonograph, people made their own music, for themselves and for each other,” Moog told the online magazine Salon in 2000. “People regularly got together to sing, play music and dance with each other. Now, most of the music is recorded, and a lot of that is listened to by solitary people, isolated from their surroundings by headphones.” Moog added that he hoped “people will get tired of being in their own little boxes, and they’ll come to understand that they would be a lot happier if there were more social music making in their lives.”

Robert Arthur Moog

Born May 23, 1934, in Flushing; died August 21 in Asheville, N.C., of a brain tumor; survived by his wife, Ileana, and children Laura Moog Lanier, Matthew Moog, Michelle Moog-Koussa, and Renee Moog.