sound module not loading/ pulseaudio not answering, audio only as root

Audio stopped working for me at some point. I have a hp pavilion dv3 with Xubuntu 16.04.

I followed most of the steps in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting and found that the sound module was not properly loaded. Adding it to /etc/modules did not help; it still needs to be started manually, which only gives me sound as root.

PulseAudio, on the other hand, is running, but not responding:

chris@chris-HP-Pavilion-dv3:~$ ps -C pulseaudio 
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
  2042 ?        00:00:00 pulseaudio
chris@chris-HP-Pavilion-dv3:~$ pacmd
Daemon not responding.
chris@chris-HP-Pavilion-dv3:~$ sudo pulseaudio -k
E: [pulseaudio] core-util.c: Home directory not accessible: Permission denied
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to kill daemon: No such file or directory

I couldn’t find any useful information regarding this error. I did

chris@chris-HP-Pavilion-dv3:~$ sudo chown -R chris:chris /home/chris

inspired by pulseaudio not working : "Home directory not accessible: Permission denied", but that didn’t help either.

Any ideas?