After a few hours trying different ways to keep things in sync, here is what I came up with for the "uber" metronome shader:

 To impliment the material parameters, I then hacked out this crude control  setup in Kismet:

Together along with the help of Stanley, here's where I am at:

So a few things I'd like to mention here.

First, the glitches in the video are caused by my overheating laptop during the capture of the video.

Second, trggering matinee sequences through Kismet, like the picture above shows, is not the way to go, but for now gives me a quick and dirty way to see things running.

Even with the limitations of Kismet, the sync is pretty good so far. There seems to be a +-20ms margin of error that  is OK for now, but will have to be resolved. Sync must be perfect.

Before getting to bogged down with timing, I will  move into more of the interactivity by setting up the interface.