Animals communicate with each other using a variety of social cues, including physical displays, chemical signals, and auditory sounds. In terrestrial animals, sounds convey not only simple information but also more complex contexts, such as the location of food or the approach of predators. The transmission velocity of sound in water is higher than in air. Because information can be transmitted stably even at night or in murky water, underwater vocal communication has many advantages for animals. However, due to the technical difficulties of recording sound underwater, this field of study in aquatic animals has not yet progressed. However, marine mammals and fish possess complex social and cognitive abilities. It is expected that these animals communicate with each other using a variety of signals to maintain high levels of social behavior. Therefore, exploring the functional role of sound production in aquatic animals will contribute to our understanding of vocal communications in complex animal societies. Cichlid fishes, endemic to Lake Tanganyika, have diversified their social systems and parental care, but the sounds they produce have not been well studied, with only eight of 250 species known to produce sounds. In this study, to characterize the sounds produced by cichlids and to examine the functional role of fish sound production, we recorded individual fish sounds using a newly developed hydrophone and observed behaviors synchronized with the produced sounds in the field. We obtained the novel and distinctive sounds of seven cichlid species that exhibit different social systems and parental care patterns: Lamprologus meeli, Lepidiolamprologus attenuates, Lepidiolamprologus elongatus, Neolamprologus mustax, Petrochromis trewavasae, Eretmodus cyanostictus, and Boulengerochromis microlepis. Their sounds were associated with distinctive behaviors such as intimidation, rushing, and courtship, suggesting that sounds play an important role in enhancing these behaviors as a means of communication. Our findings suggest that B. microlepis use their distinctive sounds to convey different meanings, as select sounds were situation-dependent. The ecological and evolutionary elucidation of the differences between acoustic properties and sound production status in various cichlid species will clarify the evolution of fish communication.