Please provide more information. What distro/version/desktop environment are you using?
Do you have pavucontrol (the Pulse Audio mixer) installed; it provides more granular controls for Pulse)
Have you looked in your package manager/software center to check whether pulse is listed as installed or missing? If the latter, have you tried reinstalling and, if so, to what end?
Does
Code:
$ locate pulseaudio
yield any information? (If you post the output of that command here, be sure to surround it with "code" tags, which become available when you click the "Go Advanced" button at the bottom of the "compose post" window.)