It was like a stick of incense without the cloying smell. I haven't lit a firecracker in years. But what a neat word history, which makes fire an analogy for a living pathogen. Punk is a fomite, and an arsonist is a vector. Usually an arsonist is a punk, too, but that's another story.
Recordings are fomites but are also sort of virtual vectors.
I'm all ears when it comes to neat words. A word can open up a whole philosophical area of thought. I remember long ago excitedly discovering the word hysteresis . This is used to describe a particular quality of such things as thermostats. When you set your thermostat to sixty five, the furnace kicks in when the temperature drops somewhat below that setting, say sixty four degrees, and runs until the temperature is somewhat above that setting, say sixty six degrees.