“With greater attention on the part of the engineer to the needs of the musician,” Mr. Pearlman wrote in the accompanying paper, “the day may not be too remote when the electronic instrument may take its place as “a versatile, powerful and expressive instrument.”

Mr. Pearlman, who lived in Newton, married Buena Alcalay in 1958. She and his daughter survive him.

Mr. Pearlman worked for NASA designing amplifiers for Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, then helped found Nexus Research Laboratory, which built precision solid-state analog modules, including operational amplifiers.

Nexus was sold to Teledyne in 1967, the year Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon,” an album-length electronic composition made on a Buchla synthesizer, was released. Mr. Pearlman was impressed, and in 1968, after hearing “Switched-On Bach” by Wendy (known at the time as Walter) Carlos — a hit album of Bach pieces recorded on a Moog via overdubbing and editing — he decided to work again on electronic instruments.

“I went into the basement and did some playing around,” Mr. Pearlman told Inc. magazine in 1982.

Mr. Pearlman founded ARP, initially named Tonus Inc., in 1969. Early synthesizers tended to go rapidly out of tune. Mr. Pearlman solved that problem by placing two functions on the same chip, and that stability became a major selling point.

The company’s first instrument was the ARP 2500, a large console-size synthesizer introduced in 1970; it was acquired by many universities for electronic-music laboratories. The 2500 used a matrix of switches to connect its modules instead of patch cords, which the Moog used. The slightly less bulky ARP 2600, using patch cords but also including built-in preset connections, arrived in 1971. Like other early synthesizers, they were monophonic, playing just one note at a time.