The Music Between Us: Is Music a Universal Language?by Kathleen Marie Higgins.

Little has been said in philosophical aesthetics about the way we encounter the music of other cultures. Kathleen Higgins’s The Music Between Us takes a big step towards remedying this neglect. Higgins’s goal is to explore the extent to which music affords mutual engagement and understanding between individuals separated by linguistic and cultural barriers, a thought traditionally expressed with the adage that ‘music is a universal language’. Higgins agrees that there are significant parallels between music and spoken language, but she suggests that the comparison may obscure more than it reveals (p. 80). While she still tends to describe the powers of music in communicative terms, her key claim is that music is ‘a vehicle for recognizing — and directly experiencing — our common humanity’ (p. 2). The justifications and various qualifications for this claim are spread out across the book. However, the core argument goes something like this: (1) humans share a capacity for processing low-level musical features, rooted in our common biological heritage; (2) music can convey the sense of human activity and attitude, based on these universally-processed features; (3) humans can also become entrained or attuned to these perceived qualities; therefore, (4) music affords the recognition and experience of these basic and shared human qualities.