What was the issue with pulseaudio / how did you fix?
It just couldn't bind a context to the sound card. Who knows, I haven't been able to reproduce it after restarting the game. Well, I did try changing the sound driver when it wasn't working in the options menu, but I put it back to the default before I restarted the game. And just to be 100% sure, I just ran the game once to see if the bug would happen again.. and no, it didn't. So who the heck knows. ;p In the first screenshot, I think you might be able to see my terminal showing openAL freaking out on the first attempt.
EDIT: Correction, the problem fell with alsa not playing nice, not openal. Sorry. But I wouldn't worry about it if I were you as like I said, the problem hasn't been reproduced since that "one" attempt.