Comment 5 for bug 1075489

I removed pulseaudio with `sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio; sudo apt-get install alsa-oss gnome-alsamixer`. The removal of pulseaudio is not officially supported by Ubuntu (it also removes the ubuntu-desktop package). It did remove the sound preferences as well, which is why I had to install gnome-alsamixer. For this reason I would not recommend removing pulseaudio for anything other than for debugging sound issues.

I'm currently using Gnome Shell, but I had the exact same issue in Unity and Unity 2D which I've used in the past.