The Dosti Music Project invited a group of Pakistani, Indian, and U.S. 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 initiatives aimed at local and international communities. Dosti, which means friendship in both Urdu and Hindi, seeks to transcend political and cultural barriers through cross-cultural musical collaboration. 

Through the process of sharing, listening, and collaborating, the Dosti musicians model creative, cooperative, and egalitarian cultural exchange between India, Pakistan, and the United States – providing a positive template for cross-national discourse and people-to-people diplomacy. 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. 

The cultures of India and Pakistan are deeply interconnected, yet creating opportunities for people-to-people contact can be challenging. Still, 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 – the Dosti Music Project provides a space for that to happen. In 2017, Found Sound Nation released Travelers: Dosti Music Project, a compilation of 12 tracks and accompanying music videos from the first two years of Dosti.