> I've always seen the correlation between art/music and programming

IBM did a study a while back and found that musicians tended to make excellent programmers. And I know many ex-musician programmers.

I can think of several skills that music and programming share

1) Macro/micro thinking. The ability to see the project/musical piece as a whole, then change perspective and focus on on a tiny piece of it, then maybe look at part of the structure. And to make all these shifts of focus fast and effortlessly.

2) Pattern recognition. Jazz musicians call it 'improvising', we call it 'debugging'. ( Seriously! What is debugging if not looking for a pattern to explain why the program is acting bizarrely ).