hmmm.
maybe you can use existing controllers, and existing strings as if you had RGB. Maybe you have white, red, green strings -- but you bundle them into a fake RGB bungle. When 'R' goes off, your fist string color will light, when 'G' goes off your second color, etc. Obviously a nutcracker purple will look like a COMPLETELY different thing... maybe a 'melon color' for all I know. but the effects might still be cool.
When you set up controllers, you'd assign color in a consistant order: {Co1=Ch1, Co2=Ch2, Co3=Ch3}, {Co1=Ch4, Co2=Ch5, Co3=Ch6}, ...
When you create your nutcracker target model, you'd try defining these like dumb strings.... let's say you have 48 strings, of 3 colors, 16 whites, 16 reds, 16 greens... so in nutcracker you'd define this as 16 strings, and each string would have 1 pixel.
I tried this in nutcracker and had a problem with the animated gif... it didn't like a length of one pixel --- BUT maybe the sequence might still work.
How will this look? it won't look anything like the megapixel trees -- but it might be interesting and as a hobby you might have fun playing around with it to see what you get.