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Phonology – a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in the language. Phonology describes all the sounds that the language possesses.

Sounds can be divided into different classes. One of the characteristics for separating different sounds is the ability to pronounce them with an open vocal tract. You can notice that vowels (such as a, o, u in English) are able to be pronounced with open vocal tract, whereas consonants are pronounced with partly or completely closed vocal tract.

Moreover the term of allophone should be concerned before going further.

Allophone – one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language.

This leads to the definition of a phoneme:

A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Therefore, an allophone is such a sound (or a set of sounds) that does not influence the meaning of the word.