 After graduating from Somerset High School in 1974, Boulanger attended New England Conservatory of Music as an undergraduate, where his thesis was a commission by Alan R. Pearlman for the Newton Symphony titled "Three Soundscapes for Two Arp 2600 Synthesizers and Orchestra".After pursuing a Master's in composition from Virginia Commonwealth University, where Allan Blank was amongst his professors, he obtained a PhD in computer music from the University of California, San Diego where he worked at the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research.Boulanger continued his computer music research at Bell Labs, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, Interval Research, IBM, and One Laptop per Child.