to be injail and not know what you're there for, emotionally, you're a wreck. does this technology work as well as the company claims? and what role can it play in the american fight against gun crime? you can tell a lot from a waveform. how loud, how high, what frequency. train a computer algorithm and it can, in theory, work out what it might be listening to. the's the idea behind shotspotter — that a computer can detect a gunshot and then tell the police the location it was fired from. gun fire. small mics are placed