Ikutaro Kakehashi, an engineer and entrepreneur who used a defective transistor to generate the distinctive sounds of the Roland TR-808, a drum machine that transformed contemporary music, died on Saturday in Japan. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Scott Hunter, a project manager at ATV Group Corp. USA, the American division of Mr. Kakehashi’s current company, ATV. Colleagues at Roland Corporation, the musical-instrument company he founded and ran for four decades, and musicians worldwide paid tribute.

Mr. Kakehashi’s drum machine — officially the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer but known to musicians and listeners as simply the 808 — was by no means Mr. Kakehashi’s only accomplishment. He built Roland, which he founded in 1972, into a company that makes hundreds of widely used instruments and audio devices, and led it as chief executive before founding a new audio and video electronics company, ATV Corporation, in 2013.

Image Ikutaro Kakehashi founded the Roland Corporation to create electronic instruments. Credit... Rex Features, via Associated Press

Mr. Kakehashi also helped revolutionize the way music is conceived and produced when he collaborated with Dave Smith, the president of a competing company, Sequential Circuits, to develop MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that allows the vast majority of electronic instruments built since the early 1980s to interconnect.