A pulse does not have to be played to be heard. This page loops one bar of 4/4 with two tracks: a pulse of four clicks and a rhythm on a grid of sixteenths. Silence any click or any event, let the pulse drop out for whole bars, or rotate the rhythm against the beat, and listen to what your sense of the pulse does. Nothing is measured; the experiment is in your ears.
Things to try: play "Off-beats only" with the pulse in every bar, then set the pulse to never and ask where beat 1 is. Rotate the tresillo by one sixteenth at a time and notice when it stops feeling like the same rhythm. Let the pulse drop out for 3 bars under the funk figure and check, when it returns, whether it lands where you expected. Silence beats 2, 3, and 4 of the pulse and keep only beat 1 at a slow tempo.