born in 1978, a musicologist and the author of the Wax Music project. She graduated in musicology from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Since 2002 she has lived in Berlin, where she took up Scandinavian studies and Portuguese at the Humboldt University.

She has worked as a translator from English, German, French and Spanish and translated, among others, films and poems by the Polish artists Piotr Bosacki and Wojciech Bąkowski. She also provided translations for the booklet to the CD album Wax Cylinder Recordings from South-Eastern Europe (Berlin, 2011).

In 2007 she received a grant of the Finnish government organisation CIMO and in 2009, a scholarship awarded by the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin to pursue her research on a collection of wax cylinders held by the Phonogramm Archive of St. Petersburg.

Adelajda works as a researcher in the Department for Ethnomusicology (former Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv) of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Her fascination for historical recordings will result in a doctoral dissertation on the Julius Block Wax Cylinder Collection.

In 2011, inspired by the faint nature of the sound captured on wax cylinders, Adelajda Merchán-Drążkowska developed the idea of Wax Music and together with her sister, the pianist Barbara Drążkowska, she invited Paweł Mykietyn to write music to it. The world premiere of Wax Music took place on 24 March 2013 in Brussels.