Musical aesthetics of imprinting

The automatic transcription of sounds in score form, once chimerical, has become a commonplace operation in the context of computer-assisted composition over the last three decades. More specifically, some ^21st-century musicians have extended and renewed the technique of "instrumental synthesis", which emerged within the spectralist movement in the 1970s and consisted of having an orchestra play the main frequency components of a sound, determined beforehand by acoustic analysis. I will examine the aesthetic implications of the generalization of this operation, known as "resynthesis", which can be found today in a variety of contexts, sometimes unrelated to spectral thought. What happens to musical writing when it is used to mimic a pre-existing sound? What are we supposed to hear in these sound imprints?