You're not executing play; you're executing a shell that forks and executes play and immediately exits. You are sending the signal to the zombie shell instead of play.

Replace 

exec 'play "/home/myname/soundfile.wav" &';

[download]

with 

exec 'play', '/home/myname/soundfile.wav';

[download]

In reply to Re: Killing a child process by ikegami
in thread Killing a child process by Anonymous Monk

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