A laser shock cleaning technology is a new dry cleaning methodology for the effective removal of small particles from the surface. This technique uses a plasma shock wave produced by a breakdown of air due to an intense laser pulse. In order to optimize the laser shock cleaning process, it needs to evaluate the cleaning performance quantitatively by using a monitoring technique. In this paper, an acoustic monitoring technique was attempted to investigate the laser shock cleaning process with an aim to optimize the cleaning process. A wide-band microphone with high sensitivity was utilized to detect acoustic signals during the cleaning process. It was found that the intensity of the shock wave was strongly dependent on the power density of laser beam and the gas species at the laser beam focus. As a power density was larger, the shock wave became stronger. It was also seen that the shock wave became stronger in the case of Ar gas compared with air and N$_2$ gas.