It seems that it would be worth your effort to investiage this area prior to investing a large amount of money. Of the two filmmakers of whom I am aware (Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren) both abandoned directly drawing on the soundtrack in favor of photographing various shapes and geometric patterns that would make a favorable reproduction of pitch. I don't know of good writings about this subject in McLaren's area, but you should see his short PENPOINT PERCUSSIONS which demonstrates how he devised a contraption for writing on celluloid. The big Oskar Fischinger article in Film Culture (No. 56-57, I believe) briefly discusses his experiments in this area. Apparently one problem is that to be able to get satisfying results the images of the soundtrack, one must be able to draw microscopically (after all, the optical soundtrack is the visual recording of sound waves). Both McLaren and Fischinger seemed to be more interested in synthesizing musical sounds, rather than other types of sounds. You probably should also view McLaren's SYNCROMY where the visuals are what was photographed for the soundtrack Bob Kosovsky Graduate Center -- Ph.D. Program in Music(student)/ City University of New York New York Public Library -- Music Division bitnet: [log in to unmask] internet: [log in to unmask] Disclaimer: My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my institutions.