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Two amateur musicians with an affinity for Beethoven started painstakingly converting unrecorded works into digital MIDI files. The project began merely as a way for the two men to listen to and share pieces that stayed under the radar. But after piling up more than a hundred works, they put them on a Web site in part to get the works more attention.

Mark Zimmer is a Madison, Wisconsin attorney for the state commerce department and a co-founder of unheardbeethoven.org. The project took off after Zimmer turned to the Internet to satisfy his increasing interest and curiosity for the composer.