Say you record something at 192khz, and you drop it 2 octaves/run it at quarter speed, it plays at 48khz in that lower, slower form. 192khz is the highest most recording equipment I have available will go. Therefore, I can drop things only 2 octaves before the sound starts losing higher frequencies. After that it's 24khz which is less than ideal.
What if I wanted to take a short, high pitched sound - like a half-second, high pitched bird tweet, for example - and drop it 5 octaves and have it stretched out for ~16 seconds? How would I do it so that by the time I've dropped it that much, it won't have lost much sample rate? To drop 5 octaves and arrive at 48khz, according to my rough calculation, would mean you'd have to record the sound at 1,536khz.
It would be great to record things that are outside of our hearing range and bring them down here so we can listen to what else is going on! Has anyone tried this? If so, how did they pull it off?