Cormac Cannon began learning the whistle from Mary Bergin at an early age. He took up the pipes some years later, learning initially from Tommy Keane and later from other prominent players during regular visits to the Willie Clancy Summer School. His playing borrows heavily from the wealth of great recordings of earlier generations of traditional musicians, particularly those of pipers and fiddle players from Clare and Kerry.

His recordings include The Trip to Carrick (2013), in collaboration with Lamond Gillespie and John Blake, The Cobblestone Sessions (2002), Rogha Scoil Samhradh Willie Clancy (2008) and collaborations with his mother, the harpist Kathleen Loughnane. An accomplished reed-maker, he is probably the current authority on reeds for C# chanters by the nineteenth-century pipe- maker Michael Egan.