In 2015 and 2016, FSN partnered with the U.S. Embassy Islamabad to bring together musicians from Pakistan, India and the U.S. for a month-long residency and tour focused on cultural exchange and collaboration. The Dosti Music Project invited musicians from a wide variety of traditions, ranging from Sufi singing to beatmaking to avant garde jazz, to collaboratively write, record, and perform original music, reinvent traditional music, and develop impactful civic and social initiatives. 

Dosti, which means friendship in both Urdu and Hindi, models a creative, cooperative, and egalitarian cultural exchange between India, Pakistan, and the United States – providing a powerful template for cross-national discourse and people-to-people diplomacy. The cultures of India and Pakistan are deeply interconnected, yet creating opportunities for people-to-people contact can be challenging. Music has always served as a binding force in South Asia: Bollywood is wildly popular on both sides of the border, just as ghazal singers attract audiences in both countries and across the region. Indians and Pakistanis have an immense shared cultural experience upon which to build new collaborations.

By providing musicians from India and Pakistan the infrastructure for collaboration and integration, Dosti creates a unique opportunity to reconnect musical traditions and re-link the politically fractured South Asian subcontinent and the U.S. In 2017, following two years of the exchange, Found Sound Nation released Travelers: Dosti Music Project, a compilation of 12 tracks and accompanying music videos from the programs.