If you had lots of ram this may have taken a while. In grad school we piped vmlinux and other files to /dev/dsp as a crude acoustic "tripwire" to "listen" to the system configuration.
I think we need to examine the definition of "pipe" in a POSIX context here. Pipelines feed the output of one program into the input of another one. You don't "pipe" files, you copy them.
I remember piping /dev/mouse (or whatever) to /dev/dsp to make noises when the mouse moved. Good times.
Talk about a memory leak.
I did that for some pics too, kinda funky to have actual memory map