Silvia Corda was born in Cagliari, Sardinia, in 1964 and has built her entire career inside Sardinia's jazz and free-improvisation scene. She holds a piano diploma from the Conservatory of Cagliari and a jazz diploma from the Conservatory "L. Canepa" in Sassari, where her teachers included drummer Ettore Fioravanti and bassist Furio Di Castri. She has taught piano at the Civic School of Oristano since 2002 and, since 2004, has held the course "Pratica Pianistica ad Orientamento Jazz" (jazz-oriented piano practice) at the Conservatory of Cagliari, alongside her own performing career.

Her first recorded leader credit is Impronte (2001, Splasc(h) Records), a trio date with double bassist Adriano Orrù and drummer Antonio Pisano, recorded in Cagliari. Orrù became her most consistent musical partner over the following quarter-century and is also her life partner; the two share a base in Monserrato, just outside Cagliari. Their joint catalogue runs from duo recordings (Sei Miniature Per Roberto, live at the 2020 Interzone Festival; an undated trio session with classical guitarist Stefan Schmidt at the Palazzo Viceregio) to a long list of shared trios and small ensembles.

Since 2018 Corda's principal working group has been Clairvoyance, a trio with soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo, who also runs Amirani Records, and Orrù. Its self-titled debut was recorded on 5 November 2017 at Monserrato Studio and drew reviews from All About Jazz, Cadence and California's KFJC-FM, plus a place on Perfect Sound Forever's list of 2018's best albums; a second record, Transient, followed on Amirani in 2022, and a live album, Chapters of a Day, appeared in 2026. She is also the pianist in Unknown Shores, a trio with Orrù and Portuguese bass clarinetist João Pedro Viegas that expanded to a chamber-scaled quintet with violinist Carlos Zíngaro and cellist Helena Espvall for The House of Memory (2023, Fundacja Słuchaj!, recorded 29 May 2019); in the Palimpsest Trio with reedist Paulo Chagas (Stanze, 2015); and in Geometrie Variabili, a quartet with guitarist Elia Casu and percussionist Antonio Pinna, whose record The Breath (2013, La Bèl Netlabel) was named to the Best Group list in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2014 critics' referendum, published January 2015 -- the same referendum in which Orrù's Palimpsest, featuring Corda on prepared and toy piano, was named Best Album. She also holds a chair in the Variable Geometry Orchestra, the large international ensemble led by Portuguese cellist Ernesto Rodrigues, appearing on its Creative Sources releases Quasar (2016) and Ma'adim Vallis (2018).

Alongside this ensemble work, Corda has pursued a parallel solo practice centered on the toy piano since 2012, performing her own compositions and improvisations alongside pieces by John Cage, Matthew McConnell, Karlheinz Essl and Vanessa Lann -- repertoire she shares with the American toy-pianist Phyllis Chen, a bio-documented collaborator, though no specific joint recording has been independently confirmed. Her composition "Tre Ritratti del Tempo," for toy piano and toy psaltery, took second prize at New York's UnCaged Toy Piano 2013 composition competition, and she was a finalist the same year in the Franz Liszt international prize for pianist-composers in Bellagio. This solo investigation produced her first fully solo record, When the Crickets Sing (2024, Plus Timbre), eight tracks built from toy piano, glockenspiel, toy psaltery and small objects, reviewed by Avant Music News and by Daniel Barbiero for Percorsi Musicali, who compared her systematic exploration of the instrument's possibilities to Luciano Berio's Sequenze.

Corda also works as a visual artist: she painted the cover art for Paulo Chagas's Live Solo (2014, Plus Timbre) and for Sebastiano Meloni's Dialogues (2010) and Pictures of a Quartet (2012, both Slam Productions), and designed the CD label artwork for Clairvoyance's debut. In 2024 her four-movement piano piece "Quattro Pensieri Per Il Nuovo Anno" appeared on the anthology Compositori Sardi Contemporanei II (ezz-thetics), alongside Orrù's own composition "Cosmogonia Semplice" and work by twenty-six other Sardinian composers. As recently as August 2026 she performed at the 38th Nuoro Jazz festival as part of the Multiform Trio, with Orrù and drummer Roberto Migoni, playing original compositions and free improvisation alongside reinterpretations of Steve Lacy, Carla Bley, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy.

Her bio also credits a collaboration with trumpeter Paolo Fresu; no specific recording or performance tying the two together could be independently confirmed, so it is noted here without a cross-link.

Corda moves between two related but distinct practices: ensemble free improvisation, built on close listening within duos, trios and small chamber-scaled groups, and a dedicated solo investigation of the toy piano as a serious concert instrument rather than a novelty. Reviewing When the Crickets Sing, Daniel Barbiero described her treating the toy piano's percussive character as akin to "a metal pitched percussion instrument," pairing it with glockenspiel, toy psaltery and tape to extend its limited range rather than disguise it; Percorsi Musicali's review of the same record noted her ease moving "between radical improvisation and contemporary music" while retaining an active interest in twentieth-century piano repertoire.

Her ensemble work runs almost entirely through standing, long-term partnerships rather than one-off sideman dates -- above all with Orrù, continuously since 2001, and since 2018 within the Clairvoyance trio with Mimmo. Geometrie Variabili's own description of its method, working "from a single element like a scale, a broken chord, a sound, a breath" in the way of Steve Lacy, applies broadly to the group aesthetic she works within across these projects: small, composition-aware free improvisation rather than high-volume free jazz.