I've been geeking out with individually addressable rgb LED strips and Arduino. Actually not Arduino but Teensy, which has a huge advantage in the USB MIDI realm because it is class-compliant and works with everything...
Hardware wise, what is involved is - the led strip (http://adafruit.com/products/1138 ), a teensy 3.0 (http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy3.html ), a micro usb cable and a 2 amp usb charger (cheap ipad charger would work). I put my strip in a cheap rice paper vertical lamp but there's 42 other possibilities.
I set up the firmware so that the r,g and b channels map to midi chans 1-3. Midi Note on value (note number, not velocity, which is unused in this instance) determines the brightness for that channel (rgb) because using a m4l device that maps amplitude to note num. (With a device that maps ampl to CC val, (which seems optimal to me) the firmware would need to respond to ccs..)
I then use ableton L9 to process audio and feed midi to the strip, making today what was once called a "color organ". Ahem.
Processing of each led color channel (r,g and b) involves a EQ3 (Low = red, mid = g, hi = blue) driving an M4L envelope follower, which controls a Jazz ME device, sending midi to an external Midi "Teensy" instrument, set for channel 1 for red, 2 = green, 3 blue.
If anybody's eyes havent glazed over by now (!tl;dr), I'm happy to share (or even make a howto..) my code and the very simple circuit setup for making it work.
I'm working on uploading a short vid I've made.. Standby for that.
edit - hopefully this link to this google+ vid will work...
https://plus.google.com/photos/11768221 ... jOuPyKqtLQ
Cheerios.