I had loaded a save where I was told to get the shield but hadn't gotten it yet. I decided to angrily chop trees around all of the village, because I lost 4 hours of progress from forgetting to save before a freeze that happened before grabbing this. The stopping of the audio happened around when my FPS dropped to ~17 from the sheer tree-age of the situation.
in a perfect world we would all be piles of sand with no ability to form coherent bodies of body