Identify application that produces a sound

At random times throughout the day I hear a notification sound on Ubuntu.

After having checked the usual suspects (deactivated all notifications in Thunderbird, muted all the system sounds in the settings, etc.) I am running out of ideas which application is causing these sounds?

The sound is maybe 1-2 seconds long. So there is no way to start an application while the sound is playing. What would be the best way to log all sound outputs so that I can identify the application (and deactivate it)?

Edit:

Here is what I did so far to trace down the problem:

(1) Checking that it is an application using pulseaudio:

Using the helpful script from @terdon below I could confirm that the sound is played through pulseaudio

(2) Checking the application usage of pulseaudio

With this snippet

$ while true; do p1=$p2; p2=$(pactl list clients | grep application.name);      dwdiff -1 -3 -c <(echo "$p1") <(echo "$p2"); sleep 1; done |  tee sound.log 

I was able to confirm that when the sound is played there is no additional application connecting to pulseaudio. So the sound has to be played by one of the applications already connected.

(3) Disabling the Notifactions one by one

The applications that are connected to pulseaudio are:

        application.name = "Login Session 1"        application.name = "evolution-alarm-notify"        application.name = "Mutter"        application.name = "Terminal"        application.name = "Thunderbird"        application.name = "Thunderbird"        application.name = "Zotero"        application.name = "GNOME Shell Volume Control"        application.name = "GNOME Volume Control Media Keys"        application.name = "Firefox"        application.name = "Firefox"        application.name = "Firefox"        application.name = "org.gnome.Nautilus"        application.name = "pactl"

In the notification settings I disabled sound notifications for:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Zotero
• File manager
• Evolution Alarm Notify

Yet I still get the occasional sound - also weirdly enough without any visible notification or anything like that.

If someone has another idea how to trace down actual sound outputs this would be highly welcome.