Rafaele Andrade is a Brazilian composer, conductor and musician based in the Netherlands, known for her electroacoustic instrument Knurl — a self-built instrument merging electronics, 3D printing, and creative coding that has become the nucleus of her artistic world. She creates music for film, theater, and live performance, moving between intimate acoustic writing and electroacoustic soundscapes, reimagining music through interdisciplinary artistic practices and self-developed technologies. My work reimagines music through interdisciplinary artistic practices and self-developed technologies.

Winner of Alpine fellowship music Prize, UNESCO/IFPC, nominated for Crystal Pine awards for the soundtrack Dead zones, Andrade draws an international trajectory between experimentation and accessibility — bringing new sounds to curious audiences and curating different formats of presenting them. Her works have been performed in Hong Kong, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Brazil, Paraguay, England, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands and Belgium.

Her Trajectory

Music found her early, and the guitar and cello became her first languages. Guided by her cello teachers Maria Alice Brandão, Fábio Presgrave, and William Teixeira, the instrument carried her across Brazil — through festivals and stages in Manaus, Natal, Salvador, São Paulo, Florianópolis, and beyond. Knowing Brazil's classical roots, with towering figures such as Villa-Lobos, Jacques Morelenbaum, and Aldo Parisot, became a rich nursery for her musical formation. With that weight of history, the cello became for her sometimes a facilitator, and sometimes a block — leading her to find new ways to perform with it. Improvisation grew naturally from that life with the instrument: a practice of remaining open, present, and responsive. It became the bridge between her identity as a performer and her voice as a composer, a way of translating thought into sound in real time, and of staying attuned to space, context, and the people in the room.

Her trajectory as a Brazilian composer and conductor has been shaped by structural challenges related to access, space, and recognition — especially for women composers in the contemporary and classical music scene in Brazil, and in Curitiba where she grew up. The lack of representation of women composers remains a worldwide issue, one that affects anyone who wishes for equal spectrums and opportunities in the music world. These conditions led her to continue her studies abroad, first in Germany and later in the Netherlands, where she completed both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees. While this move opened important artistic possibilities, it also introduced new complexities.

Rafaele learned early to be entrepreneurial about her own endeavours. At 18, she became the conductor of OMPFAP, a student orchestra of Brazilian popular music. She also organised an event to support Latin American women composers. This self-driven spirit taught her in later years to initiate, produce, and curate her own productions and projects.

Living as an immigrant brings its own challenges, particularly in building a sense of belonging within a different cultural context. Although based in the Netherlands, she maintains a regular return to Brazil, where she presents audiovisual works and remains actively engaged with the local artistic scene, keeping close ties with fellow composers and teachers (Harry Crowl, Felipe Ribeiro, and Mauricio Dottori). This ongoing exchange highlights both the importance and the difficulty of sustaining an artistic presence across different contexts — and reinforces her commitment to creating new paths for artistic production across cultures and between the global north and south. She sees a great potential in the relationship between Europe and Brazil, and intends to be a seed for that exchange.

Work

From this foundation, she composes for theater, film, and live concerts, working in close dialogue with directors, curators, programmers, performers, and space itself — building sound that shifts with each performance. She values long-term collaborations, including with close friends and colleagues such as the visual artist Suzette Bousema, the writer Tim Horvath and the live coder and drum player Timo Hoogland. She is also a workspace member of the Instrument Inventors Initiative and the collective Netherlands Coding Live.

Her independent work explores interdisciplinary formats of music-making, engaging with themes such as public participation, cultural identity, self-made technologies, and social and environmental awareness. She works at the crossover between music and design, drawing on open-source interfaces, 3D printing, creative programming, and electronics — making her own technologies herself. Individually crafted tools and systems, she believes, can offer locally grounded solutions while contributing to shared knowledge across communities. In this way, sound, its context, and its social engagement merge naturally from a direct connection with local and digital listeners.

At the heart of her practice is Knurl — an electroacoustic instrument she designed and built herself, merging electronics, 3D printing, creative coding, and material experimentation. Knurl is where she brings together her world of composition and the performability of the cello. Through this practice, she designs her own sound systems, projects, and interfaces, integrating emerging technologies as compositional tools and allowing the instrument itself to become the nucleus of each artistic process. To develop her own technology is, for her, a way to continuously reflect on and push beyond the boundaries of her artistic identity and music practice.