The Earth's structure may change with time under the natural or anthropogenic loading. Monitoring the subtle changes of the subsurface structure with repeatable seismic sources as repeating earthquake，ambient seismic noise，and artificial sources has become one of the hot topics in seismological research. Those studies provide important clues in understanding the physical process of hazardous events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In this review we introduce the practices and advances in exploring and monitoring the subsurface structure with artificial seismic sources. This review is orgainzed as following. First of all，we describe the studies on the characteristics of different types of seismic source (especially the air-gun source). Then the advances on data processing and mechanical understanding are depicted. At the end of this review，we reveal the prospect of future study of exploring and monitoring the subsurface structure and its temporal variations using active source.