A computer program visually conveys the music to deaf audience members at the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra concert.

Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star

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Russian composer Dmitry Kabalevsky would likely have chuckled at the sight Sunday afternoon.

Up on a big screen at the Berger Performing Arts Center, his music was being translated into squiggly lines and pulsating, colorful shapes as the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra played the suite from his playful work "The Comedians."

Kabelevsky's 1939 composition was regarded, according to the orchestra's conductor, Adam Boyles, as a "wonderful experiment." So Boyles decided to repay the piece with another wonderful experiment: using a high-tech computer program to translate the music into images so that those in the audience who couldn't hear the music could see it.

It was an inventive, and overdue, experiment. For years, the volunteer orchestra has performed on the Berger stage, on the campus of the Arizona Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. But for the first time in anyone's memory, the orchestra designed its program specifically for the campus's community, dozens of whom were among the audience of several hundred.

Even if they couldn't hear the music being played, they could see it and get a sense of every pulsating rhythm and melodic, swooning passage expressed in wiggly lines and contracting, red, green and blue squares, circles and triangles.

The orchestra used the innovative G-Force computer program to translate every sound — from Boyles speaking to the audience to concertmaster Samuel Kreiling pulling the bow across his violin during his brief solo turn on the concert's final piece, Offenbach's overture to "Orpheus in the Underworld" — into an image that perfectly matched the energy and temper of what was being played.

Yes, Kabalevsky would have delighted in seeing the dynamic epilogue of his suite transcribed into a pulsing octagon shape that fused into a series of lines and swirls as the music grew more frenetic.

The composer also would have been pleased to hear how fine the orchestra performed the work, bringing a sophistication to Kabalevsky's lovely simplistic gestures that held the attention of even the youngest in Sunday's audience. Tykes like 2 1/2-year-old Dalton Green — who was the subject of a series of Arizona Daily Star stories after being born deaf and undergoing a cochlear implant — and 3-year-old Brianna Court were so enamored of the music that they got up and danced near the stage front.

Sunday's concert ended Boyles' inaugural season with the orchestra, which he inherited last fall from longtime conductor Warren Cohen. In his short tenure, Boyles has jelled with the players in a way he probably never imagined he would do so quickly.

The evidence was in the orchestra's performance: not flawless but close to it. And the minor flaws there were — the winds were noticeably off in their intro to Haydn's Symphony No. 60 ("Il distratto") — were quickly corrected, and you barely noticed.

The concert focused on humor. It opened with P.D.Q. Bach's "Fanfare for the Common Cold," in which Boyles led a brass quintet that sneezed and sniffled its way through the short piece. At one point, Boyles shuffled to a trumpet player and wiped the bell with a handkerchief, as if the instrument had sneezed. At the end of the piece, Boyles even feigned wiping his own nose.

Sunday's concert also featured sign-language interpreters and young Dalton's parents, Travis and Colleen Green, signing a skit to go along with the Haydn symphony. Colleen Green, who plays with the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra, operated the G-Force program during the concert's second half.

Kabalevsky would have been pleased that his music touched so many people who likely did not hear a note of it.