Did you check what happens if you don't "suspend" PulseAudio? In my experience chuck-alsa connects just fine to PulseAudio, provided you are not also running something like Skype and/or a browser with a running Flash plugin. Those two tend to try to be compatible with very old drivers (good, I suppose) and in the meantime manage to not be compatible with running stuff like ChucK at the same time (bad).
I tried that and received the same error as before. However... As it turns out, there's an option to disable the onboard audio device in BIOS. I switched it off, and now chuck works just fine. I'm guessing that chuck must try to query all present devices, which is why it failed every time, even when I specified a different device. How's that for a rare bug! -Alex