Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.

His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.

“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986, though that did not limit him much.

A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.

Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.