The big idea with Java is that it's platform-independent, isn't it? (rhetorical) Is it even possible to interface to the system speaker (or bleepy thing, whatever!) in a platform-independent way? Surely it would depend on the hardware you have installed. Given that, there would at least have to be some sort of consistent API on a given platform so that a native implementation could be built and accessed through JNI.
I don't really know enough about it, so maybe I should just shut up.
Jules