You'll need app-editors/vim-core and media-sound/sox on Gentoo to get xxd and play, respectively:
emerge vim-core sox
If your bitcoind box is headless (like mine), you might replace the play invocation with something like this:
... | sox -t ul - -t wav foo.wav
Transfer this file to something that can play audio.
Yes. Fortunately, the testnet blockchain only takes a few minutes to download at this time.