The Effect of Tangled Headphones

The average pair of headphones or earphones tends to be roughly 140 centimeters long. So the fact that those will tend to get put into a space relatively small, a pocket or a bag or something, it all increases the chances of it getting tangled or twisted or knotted. There's an entire paper on the spontaneous knotting of an agitated string. That was used to study the effect of tangling headphones. A lot of them involve leaving your headphones hanging. I don't think that's a good idea because I think that might start damaging the cable. Oh, but certainly we'll stop it from being twisted.