Lake Bell is fighting the fight against sexy baby vocal fry virus

Actress Lake Bell, who was the girlfriend on the short-lived HBO series How to Make It in America, and is on the hilarious Children’s Hospital is breaking into new territory. Two new territories at once! Her directorial debut In a World . . . is also an audition to get voice-over work, another part of the entertainment industry that still has a glass ceiling for women.

Bell is serious about her voice, and thinks other women should take their own voices more seriously. Some tip? Stop saying “like” all the time and ditch the vocal fry, or as Lake calls it, the “sexy baby vocal virus.”

Here’s an example and explanation of vocal fry: (turns out it actually damages your vocal chords!)

Lake Bell isn’t just fighting against vocal fry, but a further evolution of it: adding a “baby tone.”

“Not only is it pitch, so really high up, but it’s also a dialect, it’s like a speech pattern that includes uptalking and [vocal] fry, so it’s this amalgamation of really unsavory sounds that many young women have adopted,” she said on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Vocal fry as a culture behavior and trend can probably be traced back to Britney Spears, and then reinforced by pop icons like the Kardashian sisters.

Kim Kardashian does a perfect sexy baby vocal fry:

Bell has also taken to offering vocal advice to the reporters she’s speaking with to promote her film. She told New York Magazine‘s Amanda Dobbins “You can literally lose a job, lose a potential boyfriend. The sound of someone’s voice is very powerful.”

In a World . . . official trailer:

Do you ever record yourself and listen to what you sound like when you talk? Do you think vocal fry has become a super annoying epidemic?