Also, I neglected to detail the actual gear I'm using, which was not helpful!

I'm running a raspberry pi with an arduino nano, hence the use f the pduino arduino object in the patch. The 3 switches are wire to the digital pins 2, 3 and 4 of the nano, with the internal pull-up resistors enabled on these pins.

I appreciate all the advice: I did try some of your original suggestions but let me try and put all of them into action and I'll report back here. Thank you!

@fishcrystals hi there and thanks. I have a startup message in the top left of the patch I posted that sets up the pins and switches on the pullup resistors, but it's not helping on these switches. Thanks for the capacitor suggestion, will bear that in mind!

@lacuna thanks for these suggestions, and sorry all, I wrote that in kind of a hurry on my phone as the opening was that night! I have a bit more time to finesse things now.

The patch I had tried was 'timegate.pd' from this thread:
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12092/debouncing-was-measure-time-between-two-bangs-events/4

@lucuna the patch you suggested also seems to present a challenge: I need to ignore the fluttering 1s and 0s from the closed switch, but capture and use the last of these, which represents the actual opening of the drawer. After the switch opens, it is stableuntil it closes again, at which point the 'jitter' begins. I can conceptualize that it would be necessary to hold onto this final signal, wait until a reasonable amount of time has passed (long enough to know it's not part of the jitter of the switch, but not so long that the sound is triggered noticeably late) and then allow it through, but I can't see how to build it!

Thanks everyone for all your help.

Hello everyone!
I am onsite working with a patch that will raise the amplitude on looped playback to rise when a drawer in a chest is opened, and quickly lower it when it is closed.
We have installed switches in the back of the drawers that are closed by the mechanical action of the drawer. There are 3 drawers total.
The switches that have been sourced for this are really 'noisy' when closed. When they are open they have a steady state that I can use, but when closed they are flickering 1 and 0 very quickly, and while it's working for the initial lowering of the volume, the subsequent on/off signal is making the audio flutter around, and over time, it can creep up quite a lot.
I've tried some debounce options I have used in the past for buttons, but they aren't working, while it does work in stopping all the on/off signals under a given amount of time, it also cut out the final one of those signals from the drawer/switch actually opening.
Can anyone offer some suggestions? Thank you!

@Il-pleut Can you expand on this? Saturated as in over zero?

@whale-av I had four buttons, so I changed up what they are controlling and have dedicated one for start and one for stop, which seems to have helped a lot. Adding the [change] object is also a great tip. Thank you!

This whole thread has been so useful, thanks all. I will be returning to it for future project also, when I have more time and I'm starting a bit earlier in the process.

@whale-av here's the inside of the debounce abstraction: I set the one on my 'record button a bit longer (400ms, on the left) to see if that would help... I seem to be getting 0 messages from the button before it is released, which cuts off recording too early, sometimes before any audio is even captured! Maybe I need to replace the button itself?

@60hz Thank you! By subpatches, do you mean abstractions? This will help? I thought the only benefit was to make things less cluttered.

@fishcrystals Thanks for the suggestions! I don't really have time for reinstalling patchbox but it looks awesome: I'm going to use it going forward. I've had a lot of audio issues with the regular raspian.
I tried booting to the text console but it negated the startup script I had in place using Autostart- I know there are alternatives to make the patch run on boot but I am under the gun here! Also, switching to text console meant I lost the ability to use VNC viewer, and I only have a teeny little screen to plug directly into the pi which makes things difficult to read.

@whale-av Thanks for all these resources! I added dwc_otg.speed=1 to boot/cmdline.txt... And maybe it worked? The glitch isn't consistent, although it is still happening. I have noticed that the buttons connected to the arduino nano may have become more jittery: is it possible this is a result of dwc_otg.speed=1 ?
The bang in the screenshot is actually because I took a screenshot of a screen recording that was paused. However, I have subsequently seen them stick when the glitch happens- it's as though the patch freezes for a period of time, and during that time the audio also gets stuck in that frozen way.
I've removed a bunch of those bangs since but it's still freezing intermittently.
I may have "intensively investigated" the patch but I'm still a noob, so could easily be missing something!

This sound clip demonstrates the glitch, just after 0:03, for about one second

glitch.mp3