

#The sound of a gunshot movie#
“What you might learnt trying to pick that up through indirect sources like a movie could be misleading.”
#The sound of a gunshot tv#
But in a place like the Las Vegas strip, which is highly built up, or even in a natural area with tall mountains, the degree of echoing would make it much more difficult to pinpoint the direction.Īs for listening to the sound of gun fire over sound coming from computer speakers, your TV set or in a movie theater, “It’s going to sound very different,” Smyth says.

#The sound of a gunshot crack#
“The further away the round was fired at you from, the greater the time distance between the crack and the thump.” In this open countryside, this can be a useful way of determining which direction an active shooter might be firing from. “You’re listening, you hear the crack of the bullet and then you’re listening to the direction the thump came from,” he says. As the round passes them, they can first hear the crack as the bullet breaks the sound barrier, then the thump of the round being fired. With a firearm like an AR-15, says Beale, who spend more than 24 years in the British Army, soldiers learn to recognize the sounds of high velocity rounds through training that places them in a range where shots are fired behind a bank. And “getting used to gunfire on a gun range, if it’s indoors, is going to make you familiar with the sound of gunfire in that environment, but it’s going to sound different if it’s outdoors,” Smyth says. Additionally, different guns will sound different from one another. To them, “It’s distinct from from a car backfiring or fireworks or pyrotechnics.” But for civilians, seeking training in professionally simulated situations would be necessary to pick up the difference in timbre and volume. “Unless you’ve been on the receiving end of fire, it sounds totally different,” says Kevin Beale, a security training specialist for RPS Partnership, which provides hostile environment training.įrank Smyth, executive director of Global Journalist Security, which does the same for journalists and NGO professionals, says those who have lots of experience around live, high-powered rifle fire will be able to recognize its sound relatively quickly, if not immediately.
