The invention relates to acquiring seismic data in either land or marine environments, but typically marine environments where a pulse-type source is fired in a distinctive composite pulse like a distinctive rumble. In a preferred embodiment, a number of pulse-type seismic sources, sometimes called an array, are fired in a distinctive composite pulse to be able to identify within the returning wavefield the energy resulting from the composite pulse. Firing the pulse-type sources creates an identifiable signature so that two or more marine seismic acquisition systems with source arrays can be acquiring seismic data concurrently and the peak energy delivered into the water will be less, which will reduce the irritation of seismic data acquisition to marine life. In addition, the composite pulse may be formulated by timing the firing of several of the sources with respect to energy emitted by “ringing” bubbles that attenuate within 100 to 300 ms to provide either or both of low frequency pulses and high frequency pulses to provide data for various processing and analysis of the data returned from the subsurface. On land, the complicating factor to be addressed is reverberation rather than bubbles.