A teardown of piezoelectric buzzer from Electronupdate:
An assembly commonly used on fire, burglar and similar alarm systems.
Based around a piezoelectric disk coupled to a plastic cylinder with a hole on the end (used to amplify the sound).
The controller appears to use a rom-based look up table to generate the sounds
The pattern right below the array almost looks like a series of digital wave forms. I think this is strong evidence of an address decoder.. I presume there is a decoder below each of the columns which actives if the pattern matchs.
More details at Electronupdate blog.
Check out the video after the break.