The difference between attending a live music performance and hearing the same piece played in a recording has to do with the way the perceived musical unity is seated in the flow of time. The contrast between the present moment and the immediate past is much sharper in the live performance, as if the notes just played have dropped into an abyss, and the notes not yet played are utterly non-existent. In either case they have no common measure with the notes currently being played, or more accurately with the musical gesture currently in process. In a recording, even though the constitution of the gestures across time is just the same, the present moment and the past moments are all of exactly the same kind, exist on the same level. What you are hearing is all uniformly in the past even though the distinction between present and past is still active - this entire distinction being displaced behind the living present. So the recorded performance is like the recounting of an event and is never the event itself, even though in purely acoustic terms there may be little to distinguish them. When you speak of consciousness you mean the event itself in pure presence, however you never understand it in this way, but rather as the account of itself. This makes for a key difficulty in trying, not so much to understand consciousness, as to bring it to full self-transparency. The latter could only make sense in pure presence as the event itself, the absolute now. But such a now is both the only thing that exists and is completely empty, is nothing at all and thus a point of infinite anxiety, forever on the lip on the abyss.