Following an update of my system, I discovered that all applications making use of OpenAL are silent while PulseAudio is running, and when I close them, they freeze, requiring a forceful putdown.

OpenAL Soft is an LGPL-licensed, cross-platform, software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API. It's forked from the open-sourced Windows version available originally from openal.org's SVN ...