Music is the universal language, as the adage goes.

That flowery sentiment has blossomed into working reality for the members of OneBeat, an international touring ensemble sponsored by the U.S. State Department. After a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, the collaboration involving 25 musicians from 16 countries will launch an East Coast tour this weekend in Central Florida.

OneBeat's lofty mission is to encourage communication between nations in the creative arena, with hope that the notion might extend into other cultural, social and political realms.

"The fundamental thing at work here is that people are able to come together from all these cultures and traditions," says Chris Marianetti, director and co-founder of the project, now in its second year. "Through the vehicle of music, they can form bonds and relationships and collaborations that last far beyond this monthslong exchange. It can carry through the rest of people's lives."

First, the musicians must communicate enough to make the music, a task that Marianetti says isn't always as difficult as one might imagine.

"Everyone speaks varying degrees of English, so it's the language that can unite everybody, although a lot of people on the staff speak varying degrees of Spanish, Chinese and French," he says.

Musically, the language barrier isn't much of a problem.

"People can come together and, without talking a lot, start to jam and feel each other out, to develop natural relationships with each other. We think that's a vehicle for finding ways to deal with larger issues and music becomes a way of facilitating that process."

In a two-week residency at the Atlantic Center, OneBeat musicians were divided into three types of ensembles: In one set, the musicians teamed with other players in groups put together before the performers arrived. A second set of ensembles is created randomly by pulling names out of a hat. A third set comes together organically as the musicians interact with each other.

"We get some really weird combinations that we would have never put together otherwise," Marianetti says.

For example, Russian beatboxer Masta Mic found common ground with Malabika Brahma, an Indian singer who specializes in Baul style, an Indian minstrel tradition.

"We never would have expected those two to hit it off musically, but they really did," Marianetti says.

"I think what's particularly powerful about this experience is that we never know really what's going to happen. We go from the call out to 39 countries around the world, in which this year we received more than 1,500 applications, to looking at all those people, each with their own interesting story. It's like peering into all these worlds of music around the globe."

In the same way that it's hard to predict what collaborations might occur, it's also difficult for Marianetti to describe the style of music that OneBeat creates.

"The term 'World Music' is a very loaded term, so we try to redefine what that term might mean with much deeper understanding. You might be able to describe the genres of some of the songs but because there are so many musicians from so many cultures coming together, it's really an eclectic genre-bending collection of work."