A computationally efficient approach to the calculation of the transient field of an acoustic radiator was developed. With this approach, a planar or curved source, radiating either continuous or pulsed waves, is divided into a finite number of shifted and/or rotated versions of an incremental source such that the Fraunhofer approximation holds at each field point. The acoustic field from the incremental source is given by a 2‐D spatial Fourier transform. The diffraction transfer function of the entire source can be expressed as a sum of Fraunhofer diffraction pattern of the incremental sources with the appropriate coordinate transformations for the particular geometry of the radiator. For a given spectrum of radiator velocity, the transient field can be computed directly in the frequency domain using the diffraction transfer function. To determine the accuracy of the proposed approach, the impulse response was derived using the inverse Fourier transform for commonly used radiator geometries. The results obtained agree well with published data obtained using the impulse response approach. While the approach does not lead to a general or exact solution, its computational efficiency and accuracy compares favorably to those of the point source method and the impulse response approach for many useful cases.