From skepticism to sonic surrender, how GEM & Cheryl B. Engelhardt’s Glimmer bridges neuroscience, ambient sound, and unexpected joy.
I’ve always felt like an impostor in wellness spaces. I love my yoga studio, but they know I’m not one of them. It’s evident in my low enthusiasm for the requisite hugs hello—like we’re lone survivors of a plane crash. So when a mix engineer insisted I experience the latest in audio tech and “where ambient lives now,” I braced for the worst: meandering synths, New Age platitudes, music stripped of all its love and funk, leaving only the trite parts.
That’s the thing about genres—if it’s not your thing, you’ll only hear the bad examples. But over the next hour, I got hip. He turned me onto artists like Cephas Azariah, Tim Hecker, and Julianna Barwick—composers who build sonic layers into tactile textures. They didn’t meander. They moved.
Then came Glimmer by GEM & Cheryl B. Engelhardt: a track based on the premise of “micro-moments of joy throughout the day.” It sounded like peak woo. I braced for cringe. But instead, two biases quietly unraveled. The track slapped. And the science behind the glimmers? Even more so.
Psychologist Deb Dana coined the term glimmers as “micro-moments of unexpected safety that regulate our nervous system.” Think of them as the inverse of trauma triggers—not just fleeting pleasures, but actual biological reset buttons. “Once you feel a glimmer alive in your body,” Dana explains, “your brain marks it. It names it. Suddenly, you’re primed to find more.”
It’s not just theory. A 2023 UC Berkeley study had participants journal their fleeting joys—sunlight flickering through trees, a stranger’s laugh. The results? Cortisol dropped 27%, vagal tone (a key metric for nervous system resilience) jumped 19%. Hidden cameras even captured spontaneous smiles spreading over time. Glimmers, it turns out, are neurobiological magic.
Glimmer doesn’t just suggest this—it encodes it. Atmospheric textures and suspended piano aren’t spiritual garnish. They’re precision tools. Unlike the performative grind of wellness culture, glimmer-spotting requires no perfect poses or apps. Just listening.
That revelation led to a broader cultural reckoning. Why is it we worship Bach’s structural genius but dismiss ambient as background noise? As if emotional depth and compositional mastery can’t coexist? It’s a familiar story: jazz was “brothel music” before it was Juilliard canon. Comic books were “pulp” before they hung in MoMA. Ambient is next.
Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol II is our Rite of Spring. Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is our Art of Fugue. Artists like Kali Malone and Malibu don’t just compose—they build sonic ecosystems. You won’t hear Mahler in ambient—but in ambient, you’ll hear Mahler’s next movement.
Ambient leans into silence with more confidence than even the notes Miles Davis famously didn’t play. Its backbone is electronic, but its brainstem traces back to harpsichord études and cathedral acoustics. And just maybe, its soul speaks to something ancient—something quiet inside us that’s finally being named.
So yes—I’m now a convert. I find myself quoting GEM’s words without irony:
“You don’t need to light the whole path. Just follow the glimmers, like stars across dark water.”
Maybe the future of music isn’t louder. Maybe it lives in the quiet between notes—where, if you listen closely enough, your nervous system might whisper back.
🎧 Play Glimmer on Spotify: Listen Now
📲 Connect with GEM and Cheryl on Instagram: @gemauset @cbemusic
Written By Daniel Creed
