Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding that uses 64 characters to represent sequences of byte values. It’s used for many things such as web pages, e-mail attachments or QR codes, but is also used to obfuscate links that a bot or scraper shouldn’t see (to avoid getting your website blocked).
In this song I interpreted it as a singer using a foreign, encoded language we can’t understand, but still enjoy.
For the vocal I used a free plugin called Aquestone, which is like a precursor to Vocaloid. Similar principle though, you fill in some text and it’ll sing each syllable every note you play. The words I filled in are “netpunkalbum”, but the accent makes it unrecognizable.
I really love the sound of this synth and I plan on doing more with it, despite it being extremely old and buggy. Here’s a video from 17 years ago showcasing it in more detail!
Also need to mention Base64 is heavily inspired by “Can You Feel” by Torchkas. I first heard it in a Super Mario World romhack called VLDC, known as Abstract Map there.
A lot of the background visuals are from the Butter Churn visualizer, it’s based on the Milkdrop 2 visualizer from Winamp. Open source as well!
), height: "70vh", width: "70vw", } as VirtualTextFile;