The acoustically pristine concert hall of the New World Symphony’s New World Center will resound with the vibrant playing of its young classical musicians Friday night — and will also throb with the kind of electronic dance music that fills South Beach nightclubs. Instead of sitting silently, listeners will be able to wander about, chatting and sipping cocktails, getting up close to peer at the DJ or the sawing arms of cellists and violinists.

Not your grandfather’s, your father’s or even your older brother’s classical music concert, the event — called Pulse: Late Night at the New World Symphony — is part of a slate of innovative concert formats at New World aimed at drawing new and younger audiences to classical music. The Pulse events are on the cutting edge of similar efforts by orchestras around the country as the classical music world looks to refresh a shrinking, aging audience and make an art form often perceived as elitist more accessible and inviting to younger listeners.

Thus far, Pulse seems to be succeeding. The first outing, held soon after the New World Center’s opening last January, drew 900 people, while the second, in April, sold out its 1,500 tickets a week in advance. Half the audience for those events was under 40, and the April crowd was animated and dressed to the hilt, filling the lobby and concert hall with excited chatter while neon lights and imagery flickered overhead.

Among them was Charlotte Piro, 38, a real-estate agent who enjoyed nightclubbing before her two sons, ages 2 and 5, were born. A New World regular, she found an invigorating new energy at Pulse.

“I loved it,” Piro says. “It was a very fresh approach to classical music, very young.”

She particularly enjoyed being able to engage with friends and with the musicians who were stationed around the hall, allowing a close-up look at their music making.

“Even though I was there for the music, it was also very social,” she says. “What I liked most was that it was really informal. That was fabulous. The musicians are very young, so it was great to be close to them.”

Luis Amato, 48, was so taken by Pulse that he became a VIP member of Friends of the New World Symphony, a support group for younger audiences.

“I am very tired of the regular concert format, where you just sit there,” Amato said. “This is a way to integrate yourself. This format is fantastic, revolutionary. It will attract a lot of young people to classical music, which has been a kind of taboo thing that nobody understands.”

Those are exactly the kind of reactions New World directors hoped for. “If they associate having a good time with classical music, that’s a good thing,” says orchestra president and CEO Howard Herring. “Then they can enlarge their classical music experience on their own terms. We think it will be a bridge.”

Other musical bridges NWS is building include half-hour concerts for $2.50, hour-long concerts with narration and video called Symphony with a Splash and longer “Journey” concerts that explore a single composer. There are also plans for “gallery walk” events at which audience members will move among the center’s various spaces to hear music by small ensembles.

New World received two $500,000 grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to not only produce but study the success of the experiments and share the findings with other orchestras. It’s all of a piece with NWS’ broader goal of opening the center and the symphony to the public, a mission incorporated into architect Frank Gehry’s design with its open spaces, glass walls and free Wallcast concerts, in which performances are projected live onto an exterior wall to picnicking audiences in the surrounding park.