Animating running lights Hello Blender Community,

what would be the easiest way to animate a chain of lights for a Christmas tree? I'd like them to show different patterns (running up, running down, blinking alternating every second light, and so on...) and sync it to some Christmas song. And at best it would be possible to change the color for differently grouped lights. These groupings would be dependent on the selected pattern/mode.

I'm just searching for a way for not having to creating a lot of material/object-data instances and modifying each brightness values individually over and over in the graph/NLA editor. Ideally I imagine having some simplified controls like pattern/mode, speed, step, ... And in the timeline or NLA editor these would simply be triggered synchronously to the music.

I'm not sure which rendering engine I might take. My PC is not the fastest, so BRE would be better. But if cycles can make it significantly simpler, I'd be ok with using that instead. For the light type I think an emitting material will do great. There is no need for much detail.

I'm not afraid of using some math. However I think python might be a bit overhead. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In the provided example it seems the light groups are driven straight from the midi file for the instruments. You can load such file in the MIDI Driver addon and assign each instrument channel an animation Action for example (like turning a group of lights on and off).

Alternatively you can use animated texture to drive the light's emission. The bulbs should be mesh lights for this purpose.

Create a texture strip with as many pixels as you have bulbs. Unwrap each bulb into it's corresponding pixel.

Animate the texture strip in a loop to create whatever color and motion pattern you desire. It's easy to do in AfterFX or similar app.

Also simple animations like switching between odd and even bulbs could be also driven with lamp objects using drivers and #frame keyword to drive the light's strength. Drivers can be copied easily between many bulbs. This approach is not that flexible though.