Martin Barry is the choirmaster and director of music at St. John's Cathedral, Salford in the UK. He studied at Cambridge University and has many years of experience as a singer in church and chamber choirs. He sings with the William Byrd Singers - one of the leading amateur chamber choirs in the northwest of England, and as well as his cathedral choir directs a choir of prisoners in one of the UK's largest prisons.

In his musical ministry, Martin is committed to diversity and inclusion. There probably aren't many churches in the UK where you'd hear Daniel Bath's Gloria in a Cuban jazz style and Olivier Messiaen's O Sacrum Convivium in the same Mass, but Salford Cathedral is one of them.

Outside of music Martin's specialty is phonetics - the science of speech. He taught at universities in England for twenty-one years and was head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester from 2002-2008. He is a former editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association and was Pronunciation Editor for the 2008 Chambers Dictionary. He now works as a forensic speech scientist, specializing in criminal cases involving disputed voice recordings.

However, church music is what inspires Martin and the singing assembly is the place where he most finds that inspiration. In the UK he leads workshops and choir festivals for parish musicians and is an active member of the Society of St Gregory.