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Ah, neat, but I seem to remember catting it to an actual device node, not to an executable.

You're thinking of /dev/dsp, which was an OSS thing before the move to ALSA. It still exists on the BSDs AFAIR but has to be emulated on modern Linux: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/103746/why-wont-lin...

Yep, that’s the one!