I actually tried something with the sand sound. I think it would sound awesome if each hourglass had some kind of unique noisy sand falling effect. All of them adding up to a noisy sand orchestra was what I was aiming for, but since I am no sound designer, and tried this at the last day, I failed =(
As for the glow effect, most of the logic behind it is in this video:
With some minor differences to make it work with the code I had. If you'd like to I can add my code to GitHub so you can have a look!
Thanks for the feedback =)