Albert LeBlanc earned a bachelor’s degree in music education from Louisiana State University and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He served as a school band director in Louisiana and later as evaluation specialist with the Aesthetic Education Program of CEMREL, Inc., a federally sponsored educational research laboratory in St. Louis, MO.  He served as faculty member and later as Associate Director of the School of Music at Michigan State University, retiring in 2003.  He served as Chair of the Society for Research in Music Education and later received the Senior Researcher Award from Music Educators National Conference, the National Association for Music Education.  He is best known for his theory of the acquisition of individual music listening preferences, explained in LeBlanc, A. (1987)  The development of music preference in children, in Peery, J. C., Peery, I. W., & Draper, T. W.  Music and child development, New York, Springer Verlag.  He published a sequential series of research studies (1979-2001) exploring his theory of music preference acquisition in the Journal of Research in Music Education, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, and Journal of Music Therapy.