Case study

SoundBYTE

Service: Custom Software
Year: 2026
Live: www.amritasethi.com

01The work

Overview

SoundBYTE is an art form and the platform that carries it. The work turns a voice — a spoken phrase, a recorded message — into a visual piece, and the platform around it does four jobs at once: it presents the catalogue, it takes commissions, it runs a members' club, and it lets the public generate their own. It is the working home of Amrita Sethi, a sound-to-visual artist and the creator of SoundBYTEs, and it runs as a public site, an authenticated generation playground on its own subdomain, and an admin back office for the studio.

Challenges

An artist's site and a piece of software are usually different things, and this had to be both without either one spoiling the other. A catalogue has to behave like a gallery: the work is the point, presented with restraint and given room. But commissioning, a membership tier and a public generation tool are software — accounts, payments, queues, long-running jobs, state that has to survive a refresh. Build it as a portfolio site and the commissioning collapses into a contact form; build it as a product and the artwork turns into a catalogue photograph. Underneath both sits the awkward part: the subject is sound, on a medium that is silent by default and that punishes anything which makes noise uninvited.

Solution

Separate the surfaces, keep one spine. Four deployed front ends sit over shared services — the catalogue site, the Playground on its own subdomain where a visitor turns their own voice into a piece, an admin back office for the studio, and the APIs behind them, with Postgres, Redis, and a websocket channel for generation that runs long enough to need to report progress. Splitting the Playground out is what lets the main site stay a gallery: the software lives next door rather than inside the exhibition. Sound is offered rather than inflicted — the page carries an explicit control to enable it instead of playing at you on arrival. And the ways to own the work are tiered on the page itself, from the SoundSCAPES collection through a generated Sonic Identity to a commissioned SoundBYTE Original, so the visitor who wants to spend nothing and the one who wants to commission are served by the same page.

Conclusion

The structure is doing the curatorial work. One build trying to be gallery, shop, club and toy at once would have compromised all four; running the Playground as its own authenticated application beside the catalogue lets each be the thing it needs to be. The result is that a visitor can go from looking at the work to making one of their own without the site ever stopping being an exhibition.

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