Audio ads spontaneously playing on MBP?

Question

Last night, I was had Safari and Chrome open and an ad audio for Musselman applesauce started playing. I closed out tabs in Safari and it stopped. (It then happened 2-3 more times.)
Today, the same thing happened with both browsers open but I closed Chrome tabs and it stopped.
This is the first time anything like this has happened--the only change that has happened to my computer was that I installed Adobe Creative Cloud and that WAS open every time it's happend.
(I've since closed it out and haven't had another occurence.)
What should I do? Is this a sign of malware? Thanks!

Answer 1

This is not malware. At most - and I think this is unlikely - you may have installed a bit of adware. However, I haven't heard of any adware known to behave this way.
It is, unfortunately, not uncommon for web pages to spontaneously play audio automatically. Often this is due to a video auto-playing on the page. Keep track of what pages are open. If you have multiple pages open, scan over all of them for a video. If there are no obvious culprits, close pages one at a time and see when the audio stops.
Once you have pinpointed the offending page, boycott it, or at a minimum send a complaint to the site owner.
One thing that can help would be a Flash blocker. Such things are often Flash-based, so blocking Flash content from automatically loading will prevent this kind of thing in most cases. ClickToFlash or ClickToPlugin will do that for Safari, Chrome has its own "click to play" plugin preferences that will do the same thing.
Note that, even if this was malware of some kind, MacScan (which one person mentioned using) would not find it. It's so worthless it might as well be a scam. See:
MacScan disappoints
If anyone here thinks they may actually have adware installed, see my Adware Removal Guide.