Recently I upgraded hal to version 0.5.11-r1 on my hardened laptop and since then Pulseaudio refused to work throwing the this error with --log-level=debug:

pulseaudio[22016]: module-hal-detect.c: Trying capability alsa
pulseaudio[22016]: module-hal-detect.c: Loaded 0 modules.

For some reason Hal fails to autodetect the ALSA hda-intel driver. So I had to hardcode it in /etc/pulse/default.pa

#Disable module-hal-detect
#load-module module-hal-detect
#Hardcode new stuff instead
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

After a bit of searching and troubleshooting I found the solution on the ArchWiki.

I haven't had the time to dig further into it to check wether the problem relates to my unsupported hardened GCC 4.