My initial thought is you're getting escape sequences or other signals to trigger the bell/chime. I've never had it crash a terminal but I've never really used a macbook. A common one I'll see in gnome terminal is the terminal printing out some info about itself (I guess there's a way to get some info back from the other side of a link) or changing the title bar.

An easy test would be to have something dump that bell character to the terminal as fast as possible and see if that does it, and also try /dev/zero to check that doesn't.