An approach is presented to compute the near‐ and farfield transient radiation resulting from a specified velocity motion of a piston or array of pistons in a rigid infinite baffle. The approach, which is based on a Green's function development, utilizes a transformation of coordinates to simplify the evaluation of the resultant surface integrals. A simple expression is developed for an impulse response function, which is the time‐dependent velocity potential at a spatial point resulting from an impulse velocity of a piston of any shape. The time‐dependent velocity potential and pressure for any piston velocity motion may then be computed by a convolution of the piston velocity with the appropriate impulse response. The response of an array may be computed using superposition. Several examples illustrating the usefulness of the approach are presented. The farfield time‐dependent radiation from a rectangular piston is discussed for both continuous and pulsed velocity conditions. For a pulsed velocity of time durationTit is shown that the pressure at several of the field points can consist oftwoseparate pulses of the same duration, whenTis less than the travel time across the piston.