I don't know if it can be of any help, but I've been playing "7 days to die"
during the last weeks, regularly for the last days, and I didn't encounter any
kind of bug.

Until yesterday evening where at my great surprise I had the same bug (freeze,
sound loop) which totally crashed my machine once and only froze it (with a
recovery after a few seconds) twice.

I checked that no update occurred on the game files, on the steam runtime and
on my OS between the days when it worked flawlessly and yesterday when it
crashed 3 time in 15 minutes.

So if it's not only related to files, could it be related to the hardware?
Could it be a faulty card (HD7970), or maybe a mix between a faulty hardware
and some software instruction?