The estimation of hydrodynamic pressures along the upstream face of the dam is a critical parameter for the accurate analysis and design of a dam. The accurate estimation of the hydrodynamic pressures necessitates the consideration of interaction between the dam, the reservoir and the foundation. The interaction effects of the unbounded domain of the reservoir and the absorptive materials deposited at the reservoir bottom are frequency dependent which can be incorporated in a frequency domain procedure easily. But in a time domain procedure the frequency dependent interaction effects are lost. In a frequency domain solution, the excitation frequencies are extracted from the earthquake signal using a Fourier transformation, but do not give any information about how it varies with time. To overcome this, a short-time Fourier transform based formulation is presented in this paper to evaluate the hydrodynamic pressures in time domain to account for the frequency dependent interaction effects of the dam–reservoir system. Thus, the adequate accuracy in the determination of hydrodynamic pressure under earthquake excitation is ensured with the proposed truncation boundary condition.