Compressed air cannons that emit high-speed pulses of air at fixed intervals are attracting attention in manufacturing industries because of their excellent cleaning performance and reduced air consumption. Thinking that pneumatic sound might provide useful information for the design of such particulate removal systems, we compared the test results of the acoustic characteristics of pulsed air and the results of particucate removal tests. The pulsed air used in this comparative study had an ultrasonic frequency of 20 kHz. Both the air pressure and the waveform attenuation efficiency were found to be involved in the removal performance. The possibility of using the Mahalanobis-Taguchi （MT） system to discriminate the removal ratio from acoustic information was also studied. It was found that conditions yielding low removal ratios could be identified from acoustic information by use of Mahalanobis distance. It was also demonstrated that: the removal ratio fell as power-on time increased to approach continuous air blowing; ultrasonic waves created by collision played a supporting role in particulate removal; and the pressure setting affected the sounds produced by air collision with walls and ejection of air from the nozzle. We therefore propose that acoustic evaluation of pulsed air by the MT system can be an effective tool in the design of pulsed air settings.