Sally Brown MA is the founding Musical Director of the Out of Silence Choir. She has been developing choirs in the East Midlands since the mid 1990s, creating six other thriving world music choirs in the region. The ‘Out of Silence' creative music project grew out of Sally's accidental discovery of hand-written, 17 th century songbooks in Belton House in Lincolnshire, owned by the National Trust. In bringing those original songs ‘out of silence', Sally developed a unique approach to researching, interpreting and creating music which breathes life into the past and gives voice to forgotten people and their extraordinary histories. The project has been featured in three recent pieces for BBC Radio 4's ‘Woman's Hour'.

Sally researches, arranges and writes new material for choirs. She has twenty-seven years experience, making a commitment to high quality work with diverse groups of people of all ages, experience and backgrounds. She is known as an inventive teacher and a talented communicator with a contagious sense of fun and a deep love of music. The voice work is strongly supported by continuing professional development, advanced training and mentoring.

Sally has come to the work with choirs from an unexpected route, led by a passion for singing. With a Masters degree in Fine Art, she spent many years working as a professional sculptor whilst moonlighting with a string of bands, playing the smoky bars of northern England. In the 1980s she undertook two years training at the School of Music in Newcastle upon Tyne, before undertaking a six-month residency with the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra in 1986. Then she completed a research project in West Africa as a Winston Churchill Fellow and returned to the UK to sing with her own swing band, touring the length and breadth of England, Scotland and Ireland during the early 1990s playing both fiddle and double bass, appearing as her alter-ego ‘Pearl Thesinger'.

Of Sally's other groups, in 2000, ‘Fly the Heart' produced a CD which was nominated for a Contemporary Acapella Recording Award in the USA, under the category of ‘Best World Music CD'. ‘Wide World Voices', one of her world music choirs, has now issued three CDs. In 2004, the Out of Silence Choir and Wide World Voices joined forces and put on black leather bikers' jackets to enter the BBC Radio 3 Choir of the Year Competition, bringing the house down at Warwick University.

In the summer of 2003 Sally wrote a story called Inside Ella Fitzgeraldwhich won the Orange Prize for Short Fiction organised in conjunction with Harper's and Queen magazine. She is now continuing to develop choirs and getting up very early to write a novel about Django Reinhardt, the Gypsy jazz guitarist.