He has previously been sponsored by East Asian governments as a visiting research scholar with Nichibunken in Kyoto, Japan, and the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing, China.
[4] From 2012, he lectured in Beijing for postgraduate seminars at China Conservatory,[5] and in 2015 was a visiting professor in Brazil with the music PhD program at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
[20] In 2012, Hebert published Wind Bands and Cultural Identity in Japanese Schools,[21] a book that identified the world's largest music competition and documented the experiences of its participants.
"[22] According to a review in the British Journal of Music Education, "David Hebert delved deep under the surface of the seemingly everyday where he discovered anomalies and cultural specifics that are unlike anything found in the West ... His book performs the remarkable: a call to explore new ways of doing high school band programmes differently.
[40] Hebert's research on this topic builds on the scholarship of Bruno Nettl, Margaret Kartomi, Mark Slobin, Timothy Taylor, and Tina Ramnarine.
[65] Before becoming interested in "big data", he authored an article examining the challenges of educating music teachers in a fully online doctoral program (at Boston University).
[66] This sparked some debate – with Kenneth H. Phillips, among others – that led to further publications on projects in Europe and Africa that made use of the Internet to support intercultural music exchange.
[9] The journal Korean Studies notes that this book's “chapters echo the broader theme that language and translation are a font of innovation in East Asian society.
This is a provocative idea, and the book does identify some tantalizing evidence.”[71] Hebert has also drawn attention to East Asian arts through the International Sociological Association.
Rather, he advocates a global-historical perspective: that humanity has recently exited a period of "digital prehistory" to enter a phase of "data saturation" through ubiquitous mass surveillance,[73] causing conditions he describes as "glocalimbodied,"[74] meaning that local and global forces converge to "stamp" the identities of individual actors suspended within a social structure shaped by participatory media.
[41] In his view, this new context results in music creation and consumption increasingly transcending earlier connections to space and time, engendering both a blurring and reactionary institutionalization of local genres and historical styles.
Consequently, Hebert contends that music education policies and practices should be re-envisioned to emphasize individual originality and empowerment via a musicianship of "flexibility",[75] with inclusion of marginalized traditions, cultivation of both acoustic and digital competencies, and rejection of any ties to "aesthetic fundamentalism", techno-utopianism,[65] militarism and nationalism.
[93] In the 1990s, Hebert performed as a singer-songwriter with Portland, Oregon-based alternative rock band Post Impression, which shared stages with The Posies, Heatmiser and Everclear.
In 2003, he also developed an original opera in Japan in collaboration with Belgian artist Eric Van Hove and electronic musician Kenji Williams.