Disable (or enable!) pulseaudio easily - dnschneid/crouton GitHub Wiki

In your home directory, open a terminal and type mkdir .pulse. Then, cd .pulse and create a single file called client.conf, which looks like this:

autospawn = no

That's all folks! Exit your chroot, crank it back up, and pulseaudio will be "dead".

Afterwards, you can control pulseaudio with pulseaudio --start and pulseaudio --kill.

Conversely, if you need pulseaudio to work (for example for Firefox), you may need to create file $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf with the single line:

autospawn = yes

This will ensure that the pulseaudio daemon gets started when you need it for any program that depends on it!