Well, then it becomes a different phenomena because some aspect of the signal alteration is now dependent upon time and is being actively modulated in some sense over time.

To use another example a purely digital compressor with no color distortion is nothing more than a volume knob automated to change over time, nothing magical was done to the volume knob to turn it into a compressor, rather a set of complex automation parameters were defined so you don't have to sit there with a fader at a mixing board and manually raise and lower the volume of tracks to an obsessive degree. If I sound like I am bashing digital compressors I am not, this is what makes digital compressors so powerful and ubiquitious.

From a digital production sense, you don't really alter time ever, the production of the song you are making must all be unified to a single click track/specification of time passing. Altering time like you say would be something like playing a sample faster or slower.. but you are always altering a sound's relationship to your established sense of time, never speeding up or slowing down the clock in your DAW because that would break the whole system at a basic level. The high fidelity digital music production provides is possible precisely because a computer can keep a clock running very consistently, and an entire music production process can be stacked on top of that single clock/perspective on time.