Comment 10 for bug 210472

Another way to fix this might be to have pulseaudio run as a system-wide daemon instead of a per-user instance. This can be accomplished by changing the PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=0 line in /etc/default/pulseaudio to PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1. This should make pulseaudio start before the timidity daemon. It is not recommended to run pulseaudio as a system-wide daemon, however.
Maybe it would also be possible to have the timidity server run in the user's context instead of the system's? That would make it possible to start it from within the gnome (or whatever) session after pulseaudio.