This composition came into being by way of preparation for writing the essay Talking Rain: Towards an Understanding. At Simon Fraser University, Barry TruaxÕs FPA 347 Electroacoustic course gave me the opportunity to diffuse Talking Rain in an eight speaker environment as well as study the work in more detail towards the essay. Introduced to Hildegard at the concert, i asked if i might email or phone her about the work. When she offered to meet me in person i thought it would be interesting to record the session and asked if i might bring along my walk-DAT. By the time i met with her i had sifted three pages of words from Masters thesis Listening and Soundmaking. Along with interviewing her about sound and composition it was my intention to give her these pages of her own words asking her to read them in any order and also to improv on the words of those sounds that she recorded. The three sections of Voices of a Place correspond to those three aspects of the interview and recording session. i thought that i would like to write an essay in words for Talking Rain and to compose an audio portrait or audio essay of Hildegard Westerkamp as a Soundscape composer. i included recordings from my own library as well as from the library of the World Soundscape Project@SFU, whose founding members include Westerkamp, Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer. In this way i was able to pain the portrait, setting her own words and voice in the Canadian West Coast Soundscape familiar to Hildegard Westerkamp.