I cannot get my sound to work, stopped running 2 days ago

New user to Ubuntu.
No sound is coming out, stopped working 2 days ago.
Everything in volume control/sound settings is fine, def. not muted, sound tests produce no sound.
The 3 things I originally thought could have happened were that I installed skype, that I tried to install flash player (although installed it still wasn't working.) and that an update had happened earlier.
so I uninstalled skype, did not change, no sound, uninstalled flash, did not change, no sound, and I did the apt-get update, apt-get upgrade command, which did not bring back sound.
1. terminal command : user-System-Product-Name:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd Produces list of generic sound files.
2. terminal command: ~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" produces
 Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. P5B
 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 45
 Memory at febf8000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GK106 HDMI Audio Controller (rev a1)
 Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 3557
 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
 Memory at fe77c000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
I don't know what to do.
I don't know if it is necessary to have ALSA to run sound or not, it seems to come up on forums I read for sound help, but looking into it sounded like it was an add on for doing more advanced things with sound. It doesn't look like I have ALSA if that's what I need, I tried looking for it in my files and i dont see it...