Elemental

What holds it together

The ninth family, added in v2. The other families are each organised around a REFERENT: flowers, fruit, living and dried plants, food, timber, the body, a lipid. These two are not. Sulphur is the character of a chemical bond and mineral is the character of a rock. Neither is the smell OF anything. That is the only thing they share, and it is enough. TWICE ON 2026-08-31 a third member was proposed on that same character-of-matter reasoning, and twice the data refused it. waxy_fatty correlated with the two members at -0.015 and -0.016; phenolic at +0.010 and +0.016. Both dropped the family's coherence to near zero and both were moved - wax to its own textural family, phenolic to woody beside smoky, its real partner at +0.241. The lesson is recorded here because the argument is seductive and will be made again: 'it is a character of matter rather than a referent' is a claim about taxonomy, and this family's membership is settled by whether the facets actually co-occur.

Smells most like

burnt match - and in the same register, gunpowder, egg.

Notes strongest in Elemental

Strongest first. A note's family value is the highest of its member facets, not their average - averaging would let a note that is emphatically one thing and nothing else read as weak, which is the opposite of what the family is for.