Using the Arduino platform and one or more Texas Instruments TLC 5940 driver chips provides a remarkably elegant solution for creating lighting effects with LEDs.

See the list of pages below for all the notes from my various experiments [duplicated from my blog postings].

Tip of the hat to the artists and experimenters who have been using some of this advice in their own projects:

• "A Journey" by Mimi SonVery cool videos of a fanciful, interactive city, including sound effects.
• Dave Bullock's experiments
• Charles Edward Charles has made a few interesting edits to my source code [you need an NYU login for this link, sorry]
• ViolaAndSky - working with Arduino and MAXmsp...includes a very neat diagram of the connections.

[Let me know if you have a project you'd like to add to this list.]
You can also search the Arduino forum for related topics:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl

Also Ben Combee via Seeed_Studio seems to have an Arduino shield kit that uses 5940's to control an RGB array. I haven't used it but it looks nifty.