Comment by GrantS

Aha! This explains a 20-year-old mystery bug! In undergrad, one of my side projects was a procedural 3D world from scratch (kind of Myst meets Halo), including physics, graphics (OpenGL), and the raw synthesized sound of ocean waves and plasma grenade explosions from sine waves via granular synthesis. After about 10 minutes exploring the world (or running around throwing tiny spheres down hills and scattering them with plasma grenades) my relaxing synthesized ocean wave sounds started to sound garbled and distorted so I always had to restart the program — now I know why :)