It seems that Chrome (and its Flash component) has grabbed all the audio on the machine for itself, leaving no sound for any other applications.  I am running KDE with PulseAudio.  Is there a way in the myriad different applications* that handle sound on Linux to convince Chrome to give up its death grip on audio so that other applications can get a chance to make noise?*- Looked at alsamixer, kmixer and Phonon (KDE multimedia configurer).  Settings are a-ok, no indication that one application has hogged the audio device.
Web browser hooked pulseaudio sound, how to release?
audio;chrome;pulseaudio
If you install the ALSA driver for PulseAudio then it will redirect ALSA audio through PulseAudio instead of hogging the ALSA device directly.