Motivated by a love for invention and for interacting with the musicians who used his technology, the synthesizer whiz had a profound impact on the music world, as Ray Kurzweil notes.

“In the 20th century, musical devices went beyond such natural ones (which were sometimes electrically amplified) to fully embrace high technology in the form of electronic music synthesis. The first synthesizers appeared in the early 1900s, but they were obscure experiments until Moog brought them into the mainstream,” says Kurzweil, who hired Moog in 1984 as vice president of new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems.