Orchestration

Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra (or, more loosely, for any musical ensemble) or of adapting for an orchestra music composed for another medium. Only gradually over the course of music history did orchestration come to be regarded as a compositional art in itself.

Orchestration as practice

The term orchestration in its specific sense refers to the way instruments are used to portray any musical aspect such as melody or harmony.

For example, a C major chord is made up of the notes C, E, and G. If the notes are held out the entire duration of a measure, the composer or orchestrator will have to decide what instrument(s) play this chord and in what register. Some instruments, including woodwinds and brass are primarily monophonic and can only play one note of the chord at a time. However, in a full orchestra there is generally more than one of these instruments, so the composer may choose to outline the chord in its basic form with clarinets or trumpets. Other instruments, including the strings, piano, harp, and pitched percussion are polyphonic and may play more than one note at a time.

Orchestration (computing)

Orchestration describes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware and services.

It is often discussed as having an inherent intelligence or even implicitly autonomic control, but those are largely aspirations or analogies rather than technical descriptions. In reality, orchestration is largely the effect of automation or systems deploying elements of control theory.

This usage of orchestration is often discussed in the context of service-oriented architecture, virtualization, provisioning, Converged Infrastructure and dynamic datacenter topics. Orchestration in this sense is about aligning the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. It defines the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management. This creates an application-aligned infrastructure that can be scaled up or down based on the needs of each application. Orchestration also provides centralized management of the resource pool, including billing, metering, and chargeback for consumption. For example, orchestration reduces the time and effort for deploying multiple instances of a single application. And as the requirement for more resources or a new application is triggered, automated tools now can perform tasks which, previously, could only be done by multiple administrators operating on their individual pieces of the physical stack.

Gamemaster

A gamemaster (GM; also known as game master, game manager, game moderator or referee) is a person who acts as an organizer, officiant for questions regarding rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer role-playing game. They are most common in co-operative games in which players work together and are less common in competitive games in which players oppose each other. The act performed by a gamemaster is sometimes referred to as "Gamemastering" or simply "GM'ing".

The role of a gamemaster in a traditional role-playing game is to weave the other participants' player-character stories together, control the non-player aspects of the game, create environments in which the players can interact, and solve any player disputes. The basic role of the gamemaster is the same in almost all traditional role-playing games, although differing rule sets make the specific duties of the gamemaster unique to that system.

The role of a gamemaster in an online game is to enforce the game's rules and provide general customer service. Also, unlike gamemasters in traditional role-playing games, gamemasters for online games in some cases are paid employees.