(edit: I might have misunderstood your comment, but see my edit at the end) If you use PulseAudio or pipewire-pulse on your local computer and that both comput

(edit: I might have misunderstood your comment, but see my edit at the end) If you use PulseAudio or pipewire-pulse on your local computer and that both computers are on the same network (or at least the machine you ssh into can access your local machine, possibly through a tunnel - PulseAudio listen to port 4713 by default), you can set the PULSE_SERVER environment variable. PULSE_SERVER=X.X.X.X whatever_should_play_a_sound Where X.X.X.X is the domain or IP of your local machine. Your local machine needs to be configured to allow remote computers to play sound locally (by loading module module-native-protocol-tcp as far as I know - a papref setting is available for PulseAudio). If the computer you ssh into has Pulseaudio or pipewire-pulse, on your local machine you can run: PULSE_SERVER=Y.Y.Y.Y pavucontrol Where Y.Y.Y.Y is your ssh server, and set the default output sink to your local computer's. Then it will play things through your local computer. You need to setup your local computer so it advertises its PulseAudio service, and your server needs to have the module-zeroconf-discover module loaded. You can load a module with pactl (for both PulseAudio or pipewire-pulse): pactl load-module module-zeroconf-discover pactl load-module module-native-protocol-tcp listen=0.0.0.0 edit: and if you just want to play something on your remote machine, then `PULSE_SERVER=localhost` can work. export $(dbus-launch) instead of your command possibly works too. With Pipewire on Debian I noticed it works out of the box though.