Abstract: There are several problems such as high time consumption and low recognition accuracy on the short duration audio events. In this paper, an audio event recognition method that combined GMM and SVM was put forward. The method used the statistical distribution description of GMM and the promote generalization ability of SVM, and used the respective result of the recognition of GMM and SVM fusion processing, ten-type gunshots, such as handguns, rifles, machine guns etc. were used as the experimental data. Compared with the ordinary methods, which have to train 10 specific templates from each gunshot type, the proposed method just needed 2 templates to fulfill the recognition task. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields an accuracy of 92.71%. Furthermore, because much fewer templates and training processes are required, this method is easy to implement and improves the efficiency significantly with a low algorithm complexity.