While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with Eidhsheim, who delinks timbre from essence and identity, showing the infinite potential of vocal timbres. While this weakens the link, the pedagogy she articulates remains within the drive to produce knowledge under the order of the beautiful. To experience timbre's pedagogical charge requires a move to the aesthetic of the sublime. To make this move, I link together Lyotard's writings on writing, thinking, aesthetics, and sound, providing an expansive conception of timbre and showing the sonic dimensions of writing and thinking, through which the writer suspends their drive to know and becomes possible to the timbre of words.