This is ARM's most unambiguously exquisite building. Its two striking performance spaces are carefully crafted to bring musicians and music-lovers together.

The 1000-seat Elizabeth Murdoch Hall began in the tradition of great chamber rooms of the world – the shoebox, the shape acoustic experts agree predicts perfection. With Arup and our listener reference group, ARM’s design resolution surpassed that pre-modern origin with a remarkable room of spectacle, surface and sound.

The hall is lined with hoop pine plywood panels routed to create grain across walls and ceiling, like the back of a beautiful instrument. It sits on 38 steel spring-bearing units, encased in 250mm of concrete which physically isolates it from passing trams and traffic. The ceiling requires no adjustable reflector – the geometry does the work, producing consistent acoustics throughout. Lights stay on during performance, keeping you in the room with the musicians, not watching them from the dark. It's a different and more demanding kind of attention, and exactly right for all types of live music.

The intimate 140-seat Primrose Potter Salon is a less familiar room for soirées and avant-garde performance. There are no fixed stage or seating. In homage to Melbourne's “restless creatives”, its walls and ceiling are carved with the graphic score for pianist/composer Percy Grainger's Free Music No. 2.

Both venues are fully equipped recording studios and convert to amplified mode serving up more than 500 concerts a year across genres.

Outside, the facade imagines the halls as precious musical objects, with the building their protective packaging: a custom-moulded housing for fragile and extraordinary things, the Voronoi hexagonal window its bubble wrap, the bluestone wall carrying a pictogram of the goods inside.