The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project

There are few DOS programs which use some kind of external sound drivers. Most of them expect to find the old Sound Blasters cards (or some sort of emulation), so they try to directly program the SB hardware. Old Sound Blasters are obsolote and to emulate them in plain DOS with modern sound cards is almost unfeasible considering the hardware difference and the multitude of possible DOS configurations. For DOS, to have a standard sound card API interface instanced in a 'sound.sys' for any particular card should have been a priority IMO. Any well-behaved DOS sound program would have had nothing else to do but to call that driver. This should have happened years and years ago, but there was no interest for such a thing. Those who wanted a DOS sound programming interface have developed their own (in most cases statically linkable) libraries, after 'quot capita, tot sensus' proverb.
AFAIK JEMM provides an interface for 32-bit DOS drivers (I don't use JEMM so I don't know if and how it works).