Gustavo Santaolalla is an Argentine composer, record producer, and musician, born in El Palomar, Argentina, who began his career in 1967 founding the progressive folk-rock band Arco Iris and became a central figure in the Latin rock and rock en español movements before turning to film scoring in the early 2000s. He won consecutive Academy Awards for Best Original Score for “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) and “Babel” (2006), and later composed the acclaimed, minimalist scores for the “The Last of Us” video game series and its HBO television adaptation. Notably, he composes largely by ear rather than through written notation.

A transformative figure bridging Latin popular music and Hollywood/streaming film scoring, Santaolalla has won two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, two Grammys, and seventeen Latin Grammy Awards, and his spare, melancholic style has become highly influential in contemporary film and game scoring.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Santaolalla