Lesson 1: What Is Pulse-Based Music Education?

What is Pulse-Based Music Education about?

There are so many music education programmes out there, ranging from classical violin to rock guitar, from theory of music to instrumental technique, from operatic vocals to extreme death metal shred bass, and each of them further one's aim to go deeper into one's own niche and expand one's ideas within the area which they love or simply want to learn more from. All of them try to equip the eager student who desperately want to evolve from a young student to a genuine musician, who gets one of the best jobs in the world: to earn a living doing what you love.

Pulse-Based Music Education's aims are no different from most of these programmes; the aim is to help students reach their dreams of being a musician. However, the music education programme does not only cover music students or musicians, it also includes the everyday music aficionado that wants to delve deeper into this beautiful world of aural artistry and understand how the music makes us move, so that we can extract more pleasure from every song that we listen to, and to further the deep interest in this wonderful art. Pulse-Based Music Education is an education programme to rekindle passion for music, as well as to revolutionise one's way of thinking, feeling and experiencing music, while serving to help you find your individual preferences and sound, empowering you to be more of the best version of yourself, musically or not.

The programme aims to give different skills to different groups of people:

Music-Lovers

The world is constantly flooded with music nowadays. From the stereo from the car on the street, to the lounge music playing in the background in the departmental store. Of course, the most important music that everyone would rather listen to the most is the music that they have in their MP3 Player that stores their treasure trove of their favourite music. Every music lover has his/her favourite artist, favourite track and probably a different playlist for a different mood.

Would you want to take your music appreciation to the next level? The programme will expose you to an array of new listening experiences and share a new, engaging and fun approach to listening to music which will allow you to take your appreciation of the music, regardless whether it is modern or classical, simple or complex, to a whole new level. It shall allow you to understand what it is about a band, a singer or a genre of music that appeals to you so much, and allow you to appreciate other genres that other people around you like, further understanding their preferences and characters by proxy.

Another great opportunity offered by the programme is to help you find the artist/genre/sound that fits you the most. The system aims to help you abolish all pre-conceived notions about a genre, an artist or a particular sound and instead build a strong foundation to explore emotions and ideas channeled through the music without much work other than simply listening to the music through a new lens.

Pulse-Based Music Education is a means of heightening one's senses for music, without having the hassle of learning the intricacies of music theory and formal education that bog down rather than enlighten if done before one is ready. What is taught is actually a very primitive way of sensing music: by its pulse; and from there we can learn to interpret and understand music in vastly different ways that we've ever done before. It will also enhance your learning if you were to ever pick up any instrument in the future for fun, shortening the process required to be proficient enough to create the music that you want, simply because your musical senses would have been developed.

The next few posts for you will give you an insight more into this idea.

Music Students

Feeling a musician's block for the longest time? Unable to improve your own musicality despite following your teacher's every word, and spending many hours practising your instrument? Or are you really good at playing but find it hard to find real joy out of playing music anymore? There are many other things that music students, and musicians, suffer that affect the quality of their music and the ability for them to truly express themselves. These are common things that afflict many of us as it's just as much a personal growth issue as it is about learning the ethereal parts of music that can't be easily quantified by words.

Well, at least what used to be ethereal parts of music, because the idea behind pulse is a means to actually explain the phenomenon of musicality. It does not fully explain everything in music, but it serves a template to analyse and appreciate music on a details-based level, for you to make the further analysis on the other elements of music. The first part of any musician's journey, and arguably the most important part of his/her entire journey is musical appreciation; without it most of the time musicians flounder and often fail to express anything meaningful in the music. You have to start as a music lover before you can be a musician; you have to be a fan of music, any type of music, before you can start creating your own. And Pulse-Based Music Education is helping you achieve your musical aims by providing you the resources to revolutionise the way you perceive music and its role in your life, and how to make use of what the masters had to turn into your own - not just the notes and the compositions, but their energy and their expressions as well.

No matter what level of playing a musician is at, Pulse-Based Music Education aims to help you explore your ideas on music and find a community of people who are as eager about music as you to find your direction in music with a supportive environment. Another thing that Pulse-Based Music Education aims to do is to use fundamental principles to help you achieve your personal sound and ideas to the maximum of one can be; i.e. as a choice but not completely due to limitations. Pulse is a very personal and strong motivational force one can utilise purposefully to produce a more personalised sound rather than that which is an exact copy of another person or independent of your current scenario. The most important question in Pulse-Based Music Education is whether you are expressing the best you can, not anything else.

Music Teachers

There's this one thing which most music teachers have to admit - it's hard to teach musicality to students. It's like this elusive thing that everyone's working hard to get to but very often can't reach due to a host of reasons. Another thing that is difficult to explain is how this elusive thing appears in a person's playing and how we can reach it. Can we quantify how this person plays this phrase in a more musical manner than another person? How do you put words to something like this which is almost impossible to explain in words? Pulse-Based Music Education intends to break that cycle and bring to you the ability to talk about musicality in a structured and logical way, without taking out the beauty and subjectivity in music.

Another point that I believe many people will agree with is that teaching music as a career is hard. Many-a-times the students are not inspired and unwilling, or unable to improve because of various reasons. It becomes a slow and draggy process where every time you meet your student there's barely any improvement, if any, and there's barely energy for you to carry on. What is it that keeps the best teachers going, and create so many wonderful students along the way? And how is it that they can love their job? There is one word which can change all of this - inspiration. There are teachers who whip their students into shape, there are teachers who magically lift their students to a higher plane of playing by constant encouragement, and there are those with a few simple words of wisdom drastically change a music student's life for the better. They all work, but are very dependent on individual, because no matter what method you choose, if you don't learn that important aspect in education, your results would vary. It would vary because different students will be intrinsically motivated at different levels, but if you were to base whatever methods you have with inspiration, you're bound to get somewhere. An inspired student will be far more inspiring to teach than a student who drags himself/herself into your room to go through same few things again.

Pulse-Based Music Education aims to reduce the difficulty of both aspects of teaching by providing a new set of analysis to allow yourself to explain things which were previously difficult to explain, as well as showing you ways of inspiring students, and yourself, through simple daily measures that one can take to keep the momentum going. It is a course specially tailored for individual strength of each participant, and prescribes no fixed method to deal with inspiration, but instead "what works best for you" in a package.

That's the introduction to Pulse-Based Music Education. In Lesson 2 I'll start covering what Pulse is all about.